#IamaGDE: Alain Chautard
#IamaGDE series presents: Google Maps
Welcome to our extended #IamaGDE series! Over the next few months, we will be presenting spotlights of Google Developers Experts from across various product areas. Discover their stories, passions, and highlights of their community work.
The Google Developers Experts program is a global network of highly experienced technology experts, influencers, and thought leaders who actively support developers, companies, and tech communities by speaking at events and publishing content.
Today, meet Alain Chautard — Google Maps Platform GDE who teaches Javascript and Angular for different clients and provides consulting services for development teams that need help with Angular.
“This means that I’m reviewing code, working on architecture tasks or complex problems to solve, which is always fun,” says Alain. “Earlier in 2020, I also started an Angular certification program to help people find new career opportunities in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. My work is focused on helping people grow professionally with Angular in particular and web development in general.”
Alain started programming on his TI-80 calculator when he was 16.
“Back then, I had no computer or internet access at home, so I had no idea that code and programs were how computers worked,” he says. “To me, coding was just a calculator thing back then!”
One year later, he got his first computer and started learning more about coding.
“This was a revelation to me,” he says. “I was hooked, and I knew that this was the career I wanted to pursue.”
He earned a BS and a Master’s in computer science. He got his first job as a software developer and has been coding professionally for over 14 years.
“The funny thing about software development and technology, in general, is that everything changes so fast,” Alain says. “For instance, even though I learned several programming languages in college, technologies like Google Maps or Angular didn’t even exist back then.”
Joining the developer community
Alain moved from France to Sacramento, California in 2014 to start his own software development company.
“As a newly arrived immigrant in the U.S., I didn’t know anyone in Sacramento, so I thought that the best way to get to know people was to go to different tech meetups around town,” he says. “The very first meetup I attended in California was with the Google Developer Group (GDG) Sacramento. I started attending GDG meetups every month and became a GDG co-organizer a couple of years later, and then the main organizer 2 or 3 years ago, which is still my role today.”
Alain says the GDG groups have been important to him professionally and personally.
“Google Developer Groups have been a fantastic help for me professionally,” he says. “At GDG Sacramento, I’ve met many people who would later become friends, clients, or both. As an organizer these days, I want to give back to the community and help our attendees learn, grow, and find interesting opportunities.”
As a GDG organizer, Alain has given many talks at different meetups. He also started teaching in-person, writing tutorials and blog posts, and contributing to online communities, such as GitHub and StackOverflow.
“I realized that most of these activities are exactly what GDEs do, so I decided to apply to the program and got selected,” he says. “If someone had asked me six years ago if I thought I would ever become a GDE, I would have answered, ‘No, that seems impossible to me.’ With hard work and perseverance, anything is possible, though. Becoming a GDE is one of the things I’m the proudest of in my career.”
Alain says that even though 2020 has been very challenging for everyone, there is a bright side.
“Since most meetups and conferences have moved to online formats, I’ve been able to give talks virtually on all continents over the past 12 months, which is a great achievement!” he says. “This is one positive aspect of the current worldwide situation: Any community in any country can host a remote expert speaker without any budget constraint, making the interaction between GDEs and people worldwide easier than ever before. That said, online events do not fully replace real interactions, so I’m looking forward to facilitating such events in person soon.”
Google Maps Platform projects and favorite features
Alain has done about 50 projects with Google Maps Platform and appreciates the variety of tools maps developers can create.
“I have built store locators for supermarkets in Australia, real-estate mapping software for investors in Texas and South Africa, and various data renderers for start-ups in Canada and the UK,” he says. “The various Google Maps Platform APIs make software development easy. The most rewarding part of working with Google Maps Platform is that almost everyone knows Google Maps, which means that users get to use and embrace the tools and apps we build fairly easily, as they already know how to zoom in and out, drag the map around, etc. This facilitates the user experience a lot.”
Alain says that as a developer, he finds the ability to draw lines and shapes and edit them with the Maps Javascript API is compelling.
“It is something that a non-technical person can use to add information to the map,” he adds.
As a Google Maps user, he enjoys the “time machine” feature for Google Street View.
“Street View itself is a fantastic feature, and being able to go back in time and look at what a place was like back then is absolutely incredible,” he says.
He is excited about cloud-based maps styling because it makes things easier for non-technical people to create their own styles for a map and believes there is great potential for gaming using maps data.
“I’ve seen a few demos of games built with Google Maps Platform, and all of them are really impressive!” he says.
Future plans
In 2021, Alain hopes to publish a video course to teach the basics of Google Maps Platform APIs, and he also wants to build a map that interactively features U.S. National Parks.
“My goal is to keep reaching out to communities worldwide to help people advance in their professional careers and create new opportunities for software developers,” he says.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website or learn more about our GDE program.
