Google Developer Days Europe 2017
The normal Google Developers day but this time it’s happening in Europe. Krakow, Poland to be accurate.
One of the reasons for that is as mentioned in the keynote: “The number of active software developers in Europe is more than in US&Canada combined”.
I had the opportunity to attend this event and thought I can share some insights of what I experienced there.
So the event happened in a place called “ICE Kongress Krakow”, a nice big conference hall with 3 floors and 2 main conference halls.
Let me describe the scene here
Ground level
Was for registration, souvenirs and free Google tshirts or as the staff called it the “SWAG” section. there were also an Android wear, Android TV and Life at Google booth.
First floor
Was all about IoT, where you can see the latest devices that are working on Android Things. For example in this video, this device takes my picture and then paints it with ink in a very interesting approach. surprisingly it took them 2 weeks only to design the device with OpenCV and Android Things technologies.
Second Floor
Was about community programs session, which aims to introduce various programs such as Google Developers Group, Women Techmakers, Google Developer Experts. It had also an area for collaborative games that it’s backend is serverless and uses Firebase realtime API.
Third floor
Was all dedicated to Codelabs rooms and review sessions
Sessions
I attended a lot of sessions, theses were the most interesting ones for me
This one was about what’s new with the Google assistant and how you can integrate it with Android things.
At the end of the session, each one of the attendees was gifted an TechNexion Android Things starter kit from Google that included some of the components shown in the demos, such as an NXP Pico board, LCD display, and a camera module.
The most interesting one for me, the new machine learning REST APIs has a powerful preset engines with the ability to precisely identify objects quick. it consists of (Vision api, Translation api, Natural language API and Video intelligence API)
This one was mainly about the new animation framework for Android called “Physics based animation”. Until now I think Android animation framework didn’t reach to the material design guidelines was hoping for and this framework would help a lot on that.
ARCore, the new AR SDK that Google created inspired by Project Tango is soon to be launched. I thought I could get some more knowledge about it’s capabilities and how it can match to the SDK Apple has announced in it’s latest WWDC.
Beautiful Krakow
And of course I took a tour in beautiful Kraków after a long day. I mean besides numerous pickup girls in the streets and someone trying to actually steal from me, all went well!
Code Labs
Second day for me was all Code labs, which is Google’s way to provide a guided, tutorial, hands-on coding experience with their new technologies.
The codelabs was so crowded that had long waiting lines and most of them I was sitting on the ground with my fellow attendees.
Deep dive into Constraint Layout
In this workshop I learned how to use the Constraint Layout editor to build flexible and efficient layouts for your Android apps. The workshop provided a starter app so that you can experiment with layouts.
Hands-on with the Google Cloud Vision and Natural Language APIs
The session about ML APIs got me really interested in what Google is offering in these ML APIs, and I was not disappointed.
This instructor-led training showed me step-by-step how to use both the Google Cloud Vision API as well as the Cloud Natural Language API. This helped me understand what it takes to enhance applications or write new ones whilst leveraging the amazing capabilities of the Google Cloud Machine learning APIs.
Natural Language API codelab
Cloud vision API codelab
Hands-on with the Google Assistant and Developing Your Own Assistant Apps with API.AI
In this session, we learned how to create our own Assistant Apps that work with the Google Assistant. Using API.AI, we saw how easy it is to create a conversation with a user, by simply programming some example sentences and replies. Using a simple web hook written using Node.js, we could interface your Assistant App with a server backend.
The best thing happend after the training ended, each one of the attendees took a “Google Home” for free so that we can implement what we learned, that was awesome 🤘
Verdict
I really enjoyed these 2 days I spent in the conference, apart from the mugging incident and everything 😅
But what I noticed is that Google can be a little too much with marketing it’s services in the sessions, It would be better if it was more into what the developers really benefit from like real life examples and experiences with it’s services.
and here’re all the goodies I got from there.
