Google IO 18 Extended Roadshow — Palawan

Hassan Abid
Sep 1, 2018 · 3 min read
Photo courtesy GDG Philippines Facebook Page

I had an honor of traveling to Palawan, Philippines to take part in Google IO Extended 18 Roadshow as speaker and mentor. To give you a recap of why I chose Palawan as destination. I always wanted to visit Philippines for sight-seeing. Filipino friends recommended to visit Palawan while other expat said it would be nice to visit Cebu or Boracay. I decided to visit Palawan for sharing knowledge and participate in community building over there.

During ice breaking! Happy moments - Photo courtesy GDG Philippines Facebook Page

I was expecting 30–50 attendees because I had experience of speaking Google IO 17 Extended Busan. Its 2 and half hours away from Seoul city by fast train. We could only manage to get 40 people interested. Considering the fact that Busan is second largest city of South Korea, It was really disappointing.

To my surprise when I arrived venue (Palawan State University), I saw over 100 students waiting outside hall. I could feel the excitement on their face about the event and Google technologies. I witnessed many volunteers who were wearing grey IO Extended shirts. They were friendly and welcoming — as you would expect at a GDG community event.

Organizers told me that there were 488 people who attended the event. [ref]

Event kicked off with icebreaking, address from Palawan state university president and keynotes. It was great to see attendees (mostly young college and university students) taking keen interest in presentations and participating actively in fun games. I delivered my talk about Android Things [slides]. I regret about not taking my Android Things Kit along to show demos. After my talk, many attendees approached me and asked me questions about Android Things. It was good to see lots of interest from them.

Wonderful volunteers! Photo courtesy — GDG Philippines Facebook Page

Everything was going smoothly until we had an electricity breakout (around 11.30 am). It seemed like whole Palawan state was without electricity. We waited for couple of hour for electricity issue to be resolved. Meanwhile, organizers and university administration tried to power-up generator but somehow it didn’t work.

On normal day in normal city, under such circumstances (no power, hot and humid weather) attendees would just leave and call it a day. But to my surprise, 80% of the participants were still hanging around there. They went out for early lunch and came back! This blew my mind. I haven’t seen so much interest in Google’s community event anywhere else in the world. The excitement and eagerness to part of a Google Developers Group event notable.

Special gift from Palawan State University and GDG Philippines — Photo courtesy GDG Philippines Facebook Page

In afternoon, we had many code-labs which were fully packed too. I conducted an Introduction to Kotlin code-lab. I felt satisfied to travel (night layover at airport) this far and motivate bunch of young talented computer science students to pursue career in Android dev or Internet of Things.

I am not sure if its possible but I would like to request Google to support Android Things Kits and a power generator to Palawan State University Students.

More about Google IO Extended Roadshow by GDG Philippines in following blog post

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