The DevFest “Typhoon” that swept through the region — All happenings in October and November 2020

DevFest 2020!

Time flies, even if Turkeys don’t 😆 .

It’s been a speedy October, and some would say, November too. Though we are only midway through the month, it’s time for an OCTOBER+NOVEMBER special recap edition 🔥

Why a special edition, you may ask? It’s because of this awesome collaboration:

If you have been following GDG Singapore and GDG Cloud Singapore, you may have noticed that we have been part of an awesome DevFest joint-effort called “One Month Of Festivities”. We have partnered with different groups in Malaysia and Singapore to bring you this entire month-long (until November 7) worth of events, occurring on every single Saturday !

Before we continue into the recap, if you’re interested in watching the recorded live streams directly, do checking out the following links:

Let’s get on into the recap!

Week 1, #AskAndroidSEA and Web Technologies — 10th October 2020

#AskAndroidSEA

Kicking off Week 1 of “One Month Of Festivities”, we have the first event #AskAndroidSEA, organized by Google Developers Space. This session was hosted by Jia Xin and Julius.

At the core of this session, were topics revolving around Jetpack Compose, Android Studio, SDK tools, and Kotlin. However, this was not like any Android sharing, as you will get to hear directly from the facts and answers from two talented Android Developer Advocates from Google. The questions they answered were directly sourced from the audience during and before the session.

Check out the conducted panel here:

Timeline for each section:

1. 2:02 — Introduction
2. 3:22 — #AskAndroidSEA panel, by Marcel Pintó Biescas and Xiaodao Wu, Developer Advocate, Google

Web Technologies

Following on tightly in the afternoon, we have a Web Technologies themed DevFest webinar, arranged by GDG George Town. This session was hosted by Louis.

Starting the first discussion, we have Vin, who shared with us about his learnings on accessibility in regards to color and color contrast in the web browser. His tips include using Chrome’s DevTools to emulate vision deficiencies and more, to better plan for accessibility of your web application.

Our second speaker, Lea, touched on how we can get started with web development with Flutter Web. Her code demo also gave great insights into how we could implement web applications, using the Flutter SDK. This is an interesting talk that touches on the changes in perception between the web and mobile development, a direction that we should look out for in the near future.

The final speaker, Will, highlights on how you can implement Web Components with Angular Elements in Angular 10. Given that web architectures have progressed to Service Oriented Architecture, and Microservices in the host environment, this is a really interesting talk on pivoting your frontend Angular application in the direction of web components and hosting as micro-frontends.

Are you curious about the live stream? Rewatch it again here:

Timeline for each section:

1. 4:50 — Introduction
2. 9:11 — Accessible Color Standards, by Vin Lim, Google Developer Expert
3. 35:39 — Flutter for Web, A Quick Look into Web Developer using Flutter, by Lea Truc, Program Lead — Women Meet Tech at U.S. Consulate General HCMC, Vietnam
4. 53:20 — Web Components in Angular 10, by Will Huang, CTO of Duotify Inc.

Week 2, Machine Learning and Firebase — 17th October 2020

Machine Learning

Blasting off Week 2 of “One Month Of Festivities”, we have a Machine Learning themed webinar, coordinated by GDG Cloud Kuala Lumpur. This webinar was hosted by Chee Seng.

To start off the webinar on ML, we have Asyrul Ahmad, who introduced to us the fundamental concepts of Machine Learning, and what problems it is crucial to solving. This sharing is a must-watch for those who are new to ML, in looking for a primer to getting started with your own ML journey.

Next, we have Aqsa, with a very exciting topic about Explainable AI. Explainable AI is a crucial topic with organizations who are utilizing AI technologies, particularly in better understanding the effectiveness of ML models, as well as explaining the predictions from the models.

Excited about Machine Learning? Rewatch it again here:

Timeline for each section:

1. 0:15 — Introduction
2. 3:49 — Practical Problem Solving with AI/ML, by Asyrul Hafetzy Bin Ahmad, Full Stack Software Engineer, Strands
3. 1:02:04 — Explainable AI in Google Cloud, by Aqsa Kausar, Google Developer Expert in ML, Machine learning Engineer, Red Buffer

Firebase

Taking over the baton that same day, we have a Firebase themed webinar, put together by GDG Kuala Lumpur. This session was hosted by Eric.

Conquering the frontier of the webinar, we have Shang Yi, who started off the webinar with his tips and tricks that he had to share about Firebase. Oh yea, and who can forget the cute dino party that he had built to serve as the waiting room for this webinar 😆

Integration of mobile applications to Firebase tools can be troublesome when in development, whereby one will need to continuously deploy changes to the Cloud-based environment before testing, incur billing costs even for development environments, and unable to achieve isolation of shared environments at times. This is where our second speaker, Nui, introduced to us about local development with Firebase, using the Firebase Emulator Suite, along with an insightful demo on how to use it.

Getting excited about Firebase yet? Ending our lineup of Firebase topics, we have Jirawatee, who taught us how to create a chatbot with Dialogflow and Firebase. In his demonstration, he walks us through the basics of Dialogflow, such as configuring intents and follow-up intents, integrated with webhooks for fulfillment using code written and deployed to Cloud Functions. This is another must-watch if you want to get started with creating your own chatbots!

Rewatch the Firebase DevFest webinar again here:

Timeline for each section:

1. 10:36 — Introduction
2. 12:08 — Firebase Tips and Tricks for the Web, by Lim Shang Yi, Google Developer Expert for Firebase, Senior Software Engineer, Hubble
3. 48:00 — Mastering Local-first Development with Firebase, by Somjintana Korbut (Nui), iOS Developer, Rainforest Connection
4. 1:26:56 — Building Chatbot using Dialogflow and Firebase, by Jirawatee, Google Developer Expert for Firebase

Week 3, re:Work and ML Workshop— 24th October 2020

re:Work

Initializing Week 3 of “One Month Of Festivities”, we have a re:Work themed webinar, masterminded by GDG Singapore. This webinar is headed by Julius.

For those who are not familiar with re:Work, it is an initiative by Google. The idea behind re:Work is the mass of knowledge, research, and discussions to prioritize people in any place of employment.

In this webinar, we have two distinct panels, the first of which is themed “Engineering Through the Lens of CEOs”. For this first panel, we have panelists Ralph Vincent Regalado, CEO of Senti AI, Herve Roussel, CEO of Quod.AI, Ryo Chikazawa, CEO of Autify. From this star-studded lineup of panelists, we learn about the challenges that these CEOs face in managing their own companies and meeting their employees' expectations and vice versa. This is a must-watch for any aspiring leader in any organization.

Moving on to the second panel, we have a more technical panel with senior engineers, themed “Scaling Your Engineering Career, A Panel with Senior Engineers”. Through this panel, we learn from panelists Henry Suryawirawan, Strategic Cloud Engineer at Google, Ronald Stevanus, Engineering Manager at ShopBack, Jinny Wong, Team Lead at SP Group, and Weiyuan Liu, Staff Software Engineer at Hubble. This panel was specially crafted for engineers in general, allowing them to model their growth through senior engineers who came before them.

Rewatch the entire re:Work session again in the following, or the marked times for the different panels:

Timeline for each section:

1. 8:34 — Engineering Through the Lens of CEOs
2. 1:06:56 — Scaling Your Engineering Career, A Panel with Senior Engineers

ML Workshop

Next in the spotlight, we have a Machine Learning workshop, orchestrated by WTM Kuala Lumpur and WTM Singapore. This event was hosted by Arwa.

While the title does refer to the event as a Machine Learning Workshop, our speaker, Galuh Sahid, details the motivation behind text classification, outlining examples of why and how it can be performed, and principles of BERT. In the workshop portion, she leads the audience on an insightful exercise in using BERT to achieve text classification with TensorFlow 2, through Colab.

If you’re interested, run through her code lab here, while watching the live stream again from this link: https://fb.watch/1CmWznR0Um/

Timeline for each section:

1. 3:20 — Introduction
2. 5:12 —BERT for Text Classification with Keras/TensorFlow 2, by Galuh Sahid, Data Scientist at Gojek

Week 4, Android and Google Cloud— 31st October 2020

Android

Commercing Week 4 of “One Month Of Festivities”, we have an Android themed webinar, brought to us by GDG Singapore. This event was hosted by Toru and Julius.

To start off, we had JT who talked about Annotation Processing in Kotlin. The whole idea of using annotation processing is to help streamline our code and make it more readable.

Next, We have Wonyoung Choi a.k.a Toru with various topics that Google has released this year through its live stream. He introduced 4 topics among Android Jetpack, such as App Startup API, Hilt (DI library), Navigation Component, and DataStore API with simple use cases combined.

Lastly, we had Veronika Bae from Korea. In her talk, she shared the various complications behind findViewById and introduced various means by which one can effectively use ViewBinding to improve app performance.

Rewatch the Android DevFest webinar here:

Timeline for each section:

1. 7:13 — Introduction
2. 11:51 — Kotlin Code Generation, by JT, Lead Mobile Developer, NetVirta
3. 36:27 — Building an app, using Google’s new suites, by Wonyoung Choi (a.k.a Toru), Android Advocate, Singapore Tourism Board
4. 1:21:00 — FindViewBindings, All ways to bind views, by Veronika Bae, Android Developer, Coupang

Google Cloud

Passing over the torch that same day, we have a Google Cloud themed webinar, initiated by GDG Cloud Singapore. This event was hosted by Weiyuan.

The first of our three speakers, Albert, relates to us how we could use Serverless tools with CI tools in Google Cloud, for a truly “managed” experience. In his demo, he shows how one can manage applications in Google Cloud, integrated with CICD, with ease.

The second of the speakers, Hairizuan, detailed on what could be described as a madman with a stroke of genius, to manage deployments in Google Kubernetes Engine, with Google Sheets. His sharing enables learning of underlying concepts in managing your Kubernetes clusters.

Last but not least, our final speaker, Akilesh, demonstrates how we can use Colab to configure environments and run scripts for BigQuery ML. For those who are not familiar with Colab and BQML and want to learn more, you definitely should catch this insightful demo by Akilesh.

Rewatch the Google Cloud DevFest webinar here:

Timeline for each section:

1. 9:34 — Opening Note
2. 25:37 — Cloud Build, Zero to CI/CD in 30 mins, by Albert Padin, GDE for Cloud and ML, CTO of Symph
3. 1:25:06 — Deploy via Spreadsheets? That’s probably a bad idea, by Hairizuan Noorazman, GDE for Cloud, DevOps Engineer at Acronis
4. 2:12:43 — BQ and Tensorflow, by Akilesh Anandharaj, Senior Data Service Engineer, Data Spark
5. 3:00:22 — Closing Note

Week 5, Flutter, Design and UX — 7th November 2020

Flutter and Design

Typing up “One Month Of Festivities” with Week 5, we have a Flutter and Design themed webinar, assembled by WTM George Town. This event was hosted by Racheal.

Starting off the webinar, we have Yong Shean, who brought with her the three laws of Test Driven Development, as well as why you should adopting the TDD paradigm. She also paired her sharing with a live demo on implementing TDD when actively developing an application.

Following up, we have our second speaker Chee Seng, who shared with us his various secrets of getting through designer interviews (shhh, mum’s the word, come listen to his secrets in the following video).

Check out the live stream on YouTube again in the following:

Timeline for each section:

1. 1:45 — Introduction
2. 6:13 — Test driven development with Flutter, by Yong Shean Chong
3. 1:01:22 — UI/UX Job Interviews: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, by Chee Seng Leong, GDG Cloud KL Lead, Design Apprentice at Stampede Design

User Experience

Establishing the final countdown to the festivities, we have a User Experience themed webinar, hosted by GBG George Town. The hosts for this live stream, are Samantha, Abel, Shuant and Hui Ming.

In this webinar, the first speaker, Hari, started off by discussing on how any organization can use Google Analytics and Google Optimize to conduct A/B tests and Multivariate tests, and also Firebase to conduct A/B tests. Along with the knowledge sharing, was a short demo on both toolsets.

The second speaker, Mervin, shared with us the challenges faced with getting product feedback, and detailed some best practices and recommendations on making product feedback accessible. Both of these UX oriented talks, are something that you definitely should not miss.

Check out the live stream on Facebook again from this link: https://fb.watch/1C9oeJaeOZ/

Timeline for each section:

1. 11:05 — Introduction to GBG George Town
2. 18:30 — Identify opportunities and optimize user experience using Google Optimize/Firebase, by Hari Prasath Velumani, Lead Digital Analytics Strategist, eClerx Digital
3. 1:31:00 — Making product feedback accessible for all, by Mervin Ng, UX Lead, Madison Technologies

Before ending this post, we would like to acknowledge and thank all of the different organizing teams in each of the following groups. Without their hard work, we would not be able to pull off such an awesome event for all of you!

With that, we have come to the end of this OCTOBER+NOVEMBER special recap edition 🔥 . It’s been an exciting 5+ weeks, and hopefully, we would be able to deliver a DevFest of such proportions to you again next year!

Anyways, till next time, ciao~