What I learned at Google Developer Days — Day 1

“GDD India” happened in Bangalore, India on 1st and 2nd of December 2017

This post is about the first day of Google Developer Days

• Day 1
• Day 2

TL;DR

Check out all the recording of the talks here:

And here are the codes and instructions for all the training sessions:

Google Developer Days 2017_Google Codelabs_codelabs.developers.google.com

What Are Google Developer Days?

Google Developer Days (GDD) are global events that showcase the latest developer products and platforms from Google.

I was one of the lucky ones who got the opportunity to attend this event. In this post, I will be sharing some of my insights, memories, and everything that I learned at this amazing event.

I found out about GDD while I was in Mumbai to attend GDG DevFest. As this was the first time that GDD was going to be held in India, I immediately signed up! Although I was told that it was too late to get selected, I hoped that I would get selected. And Voila! I received the confirmation mail only a few days before the event.

Networking in Metro 😆

I met some really cool people at the event. But I also met some guys on my way back home in the Metro.

To be honest, I did most of the networking while in transit. Part of the reason for this is because the talks at the event were so good that I was totally completely engrossed into listening to what the speaker had to say!

Another part of the reason is that even as a Content Writer, I recognize myself as a React Native guy! So it was a bit difficult to me to relate to developers who, if I have to say, are staunch supporters of Android.

The Venue

The event was held in a place called “BIEC”, India’s premium international exhibition & conference facility. BIEC complements its 40,000 sq.m of covered space in four aesthetically and functionally designed exhibition halls. The place was so huge that even 2 days were not enough for me to completely explore it.

Keeping the enormity of the venue aside, there were so many things going on simultaneously that it was impossible to see, do and experience everything. Also, there were huge queues for almost all the events 😆.

I got to meet developers from the around the world, both beginners and experts. There were developers from well known companies like PayPal, and also developers from budding start-ups.

The event was full of talks from Googler’s and Developer Community on a wide range of Google products.

Day 1

GDD India was lauched with this:

Kudos to Google Developers for choosing this amazing music 😄.

Goodies — Android Things

At the Sandbox area, there was a cute little Drawbot.

Drawbot uses a camera powered by Pico Pro to capture an image and then scales it onto the screen. The bot then draws the captured picture on the paper.

What’s amazing is that we actually got to take a Pico Pro Maker Kit home with us! 😂

Community Lounge

The community lounge had some really good talks and discussions. Here I learned how GDGs and meetups can help spread our knowledge and help grow the community.

The “Solve for India” initiative aims at guiding developers. This shows a lot of promise.

I had the opportunity to meet many developers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists and students.

Day 1 Talks

Opening Keynote

Pankaj Gupta, Daniel Galpin, Francis Ma, Sachit Mishra, Tal Oppenheimer, Kaz Sato and Anitha Vijayakumar spoke about the latest news and updates to Google’s developer products and platforms such as Android, Google Assistant, Google Cloud Platform, Firebase (and Cloud Firestore), TensorFlow, and many more.

So many speakers in one keynote!!

Progressive Web Apps: What, Why and How?

In this talk, Sam Dutton with Jiewei Lin from UC Browser and Sarah Clark explained why Progressive Web Apps are being considered to be the next big thing! By combining the best of Web and apps, PWAs are able to load quickly even on flaky networks. PWAs can also re-engage with users by sending push notifications, and load as top-level, full screen experiences.

This pseudo-quote really cracked me up 😆 :

“The best app is the least app” — Abraham Lincoln (not)

Real-World Machine Learning with TensorFlow and Cloud ML

Kaz Sato here spoke about TensorFlow — Google’s open source library for machine learning.

TensorFlow has been democratizing the world of machine intelligence since its launch in 2015. Combining TensorFlow with the scalability of Cloud ML allows almost anyone to use TensorFlow to gain access to some really deep learning technology at a very cheap price and without much expertise.

Introducing Cloud Firestore

People have been talking about Cloud Firestore since the release of its beta version. In this talk, Dan McGrath ☁ shares all the details about Cloud Firestore and demonstrates how one can build a scalable app using this awesome new technology.

Basically, Cloud Firestore is a fully-managed NoSQL document database for mobile and web app development It’s designed to easily store and sync app data at a global scale.

Testing Out Kotlin

In this talk, Sean McQuillan taught us how to use Kotlin through a deep dive into writing tests.

Kotlin is a high-level language that’s fully integrated with Java and Android Studio. Kotlin has been such a huge success that it is already being to create production level apps!

Sean testifies that a developer can easily learn this language by writing readable tests in it.

Building an E-commerce Site with AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open-source initiative by Google that aims to make the web better for all.

The project enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing irrespective of device and distribution platforms.

Webp pages and ads published in the AMP load near instantly, giving users a smooth and a more engaging experience on mobile and desktop.

Publishers and advertisers can decide how to present their and what technology vendors to use, all while maintaining and improving key performance indicators.

In this talk, Ben Morss and Raghu Simha showed me all the amazing things that one can do with AMP, including how to create a complete e-commerce site using AMP.

Diving into Oreo and the Support Library

No this talk is not about the creamy, delicious biscuit. Daniel Galpin speaks about Android 8.0 (Oreo) and the Support Library, which provides a standard way to provide newer features on earlier versions of Android or gracefully fall back to equivalent functionality.

In addition, Support Libraries provide additional convenience classes and features that are not available in the standard Framework API. These classes make development even more easier and provides support to additional devices.

What’s Up with the Internet of Things, TensorFlow, and the Google Assistant

Google has a wide range of platforms and tools that support computing anywhere and everywhere.

In this session, Wayne Piekarski speaks about learn how Android Things can be used to simplify the development and production of IoT devices.

Also learn how to build apps for the Google Assistant and have a conversation with your users. Even more, see how Android phones, Android Wear, and TV allow users to interact with your service anytime and anywhere.

Wayne also spoke about how TensorFlow can be used to make machine learning easy in different kinds of IoT applications.

Developing Conversational Apps for the Google Assistant Using Actions on Google

Daniel Imrie-Situnayake spoke about how Actions on Google can expand the capabilities of Google Assistant, allowing us to create our own conversational apps.

Daniel also spoke about the key components of Actions on Google and showed me how to use tools like DialogFlow to easily build apps for the Google Assistant. Voice User Interface was something that truly blew me away! VUI can be using to create a really compelling conversational user experience.

Location and Battery

We all love location-based apps. Be it apps like Uber, OLA, Foodpanda or even Pokemon Go. These apps have one thing in common and that is they are all heavily dependent on location. But location in turn relies on battery users.

Apps that use Location services are known to be one of the principle sources of battery drain. Shailen Tuli talks about the complex relationship between location and battery, discussing strategies for writing location-rich apps while also minimizing the battery drain.

Actionable Insights with Firebase

Analytics and insights are core to every app’s success. Amrit Sanjeev spoke about how Firebase answers key questions about your apps’s users and their behavior.This will help you make smart decisions regarding your product roadmap.

Frameworks and Tools for Progressive Web Apps

Two years ago, developers had to do most of their apps’s plumbing by themselves if they want to take advantage of the new APIs available in the browser.

Today, we have powerful and robust tools that developer of any background can use to quickly ship more engaging apps. In this sessions, Rowan Merewood spoke about the best PWA practices and practical tips alongwith various tools to getting started.

Architecture Components — Use Cases

Architecture Components is a set of libraries that can help you design robust, testable, and maintainable apps.

Florina Muntenescu discusses what each of these libraries do, and also shows us the patterns that one should follow to design awesome apps.

Containers, Kubernetes, and Google Cloud

It is understandably easier to design a single microservice. But things start to get messy when we need to create multiple microservices.

Managing a cluster of microservices, while worrying about rollouts and rollbacks, scaling individual services on demand, and securely sharing data among services is an extremely complex job.

In it’s effort to come up with a solution to this issue, Google created Kubernetes: an open-source container management system.

KC Ayyagari takes a simple microservice, containerizes it using Docker, and then scales it to a cluster of resilient microservices managed by Kubernetes. All while explaining why Kubernetes is a great system for automating deployment, operation, and scaling of containerized applications.

Modern Tooling, Testing, and Automation: Getting Started with Lighthouse and Puppeteer

Modern Web Development requires modern tooling.

Eric Bidelman and Vinamrata Singal talked about the latest goodies from the Chrome DevTools team.

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. It can be run against any web page, public or requiring authentication. Lighthouse provides audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more.

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control “headless” Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full Chrome.

Extend Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides with Add-ons

Wesley Chun spoke about how one can add their own functionality to G Suite apps like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides by using Add-ons.

Add-ons allows a developer to write code to access their data, including customizing the menus and sidebars in the user interface, get data from the another server or connect to a database.

Google Apps Script is a JavaScript cloud scripting language that provides easy ways to automate tasks across Google products and third party services and build web applications.

Quality over Quantity: Why Quality Matters

Johannes Tonollo and Nick Fortescue showed me how to use Material Design and Android Vitals to improve user experience and increase engagement and retention.

What’s Next for the Web

Thomas Steiner spoke about the what is yet to happen in the world of web. He discussed about API’s, platforms, and technologies.

My favourite part of this talk was the Web Quiz by Jake Archibald 😄.

After Party

The first day of GDD ended with an energetic musical experience thanks to Raghu Dixit and his band. He managed to make the audience put their phones down and their hands in the air! A truly impossible feat 😆.

To Be Continued…

And all this happened in just the first day of GDD 😄.

Click here to know what amazing things happened on the Day 2!

I am Rajat S, Technical Content Writer at GeekyAnts. Aspiring Coder who has a long way to go. A Die-Hard DC Comics Fan who loves Marvel Movies. Known for multi tasking.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully this was helpful! Be sure to 👏 and follow me here and on Twitter and Facebook to stay updated about new posts from me!