Technology Connections — Capital Region Google Developer Group — 2016 in the Rearview Mirror
2015 was a year of continued community engagement and of making lasting and mutually valuable connections within local, regional and more remote technology and business communities. I truly value all of the excellent individuals and organizations I’ve had the pleasure of connecting with.
2016 by contrast was a year of stepping back and assessing trends to determine how to leverage those experiences to have a larger impact specifically on Upstate NY ecosystems, by leveraging broader technology communities in a win-win manner. Given the outreach I had experienced, I was confident that a unique solution could be pulled together. The key lesson learned in engaging these communities is to ensure mutual relevance and to be specific, yet flexible. When building bridges between them, the bar is raised even higher.
As an engineer in the space of data center and internet of things (embedded) technology, the best outlet was to take a founders role. Based on efforts invested in the growing Upstate NY technical and startup ecosystems, and participation in existing organizations transforming technology, but from different angles, my co-founder, Kris Walker and I chose to engage key agile-minded, progressive technical leaders in Upstate NY to ensure successful launch of the Capital Region Google Developer Group (GDGCR). The stated goal of GDGCR is to advance or reboot the software skills and opportunities of the software developer community. Check out Kris’ authentic account of building a tech company in Upstate NY here.
GDGCR works in close collaboration with the initial group of technical leaders, as well as an expanding network of other supporting individuals and organizations, to continue the growth of and impact of efforts of GDGCR.
Mutual relevance was leveraged for the benefit of the developer community in Upstate NY roughly 6 months after forming GDGCR and operating meetups and other events. In November 2016, GDGCR held a successful “DevFest” conference in collaboration with local and remote supporters Google Developers, The Wagoner Firm, Troy Innovation Garage, Troy Web Consulting, Minio, Hudson Valley Community College and Apprenda. This was a multi-track, single-day conference that featured talks, demos, panel discussions and workshops featuring IBM (OpenWhisk), Google (TensorFlow and Firebase), Apprenda (Concurrency paradigms and kubernetes) GE Digital (Predix), Reconfigure.io (Golang programming of FPGAs) Ardan Labs (Bill Kennedy — Golang training), Odd Networks (Roku CLI tool in Golang), Josh Adams, and CommerceHub as well as other Google Developer Experts and Mentors.
Overall, the DevFest event was an excellent interim culmination of efforts to engage previously disjoint communities in a common purpose. DevFest also provided a buffet of different technologies for developers in attendance to get exposure to. We expect the interest level in exploring new technology to only increase. You can view a wrap-up video of the event, produced by event participant StartFast Code. (The story of community commitment behind production of this video is a post unto itself).
We, at GDGCR are looking forward to even more impact and engagement in 2017. If you are in Upstate NY and interested in participating in this growth in technology, just reach out via email to gdg.capitalregion.jer@gmail.com, or better yet, join our meetups held in the greater Albany, NY area (Troy, Saratoga/Malta, Schenectady). We are at 224 members as I write this. We hope to see more developers at future meetups and to keeping the momentum going.
Cheers.
