Tech Sessions: New European Google Developers Groups online joint initiative
Published on behalf of the GDG Tech Sessions team: Carlos, Cristina B, Cristina P, Diogo, Fernando, Inês, Filipe, Orestes and Maria.
A few months ago, we were on the move. Until we stopped.
And it stopped a whole community movement around the world, including the Google Developers Group.
With over 350 GDG communities in Europe and doing an average of 50 meetups per week, it’s amazing the impact each community has and the constant desire to help and benefit the world, even in small regions. Together, we contribute to the dissemination of knowledge, create new projects and touch the minds and hearts of the people who follow us.
However, with the coronavirus outbreak that affects millions of people every day, with most of us at home, there is an urgent need to reinvent and create new solutions to what we already had in common. With this pandemic, we also needed to stop and rethink our activities.
We began thinking about solutions to maintain a good balance between common identity and local differences, maintaining the “sense of belonging” and autonomy of each community, providing tools that would facilitate its re-invention.
And as many other community stories, that’s how GDG Tech Sessions was born: out of the collaboration of an international team of GDG organizers from Madeira, Lisbon, Vigo, Santiago de Compostela, and WTM Spain. We’re looking forward to other organizers to join the team.
What are GDG Tech Sessions?
GDG Tech Sessions (http://tech-sessions.com/) is an adaptive way to support GDGs and other communities to share knowledge, helping them make the turn into digital events. Besides the fact that online events are the only way to keep our activity running, it is also an excellent mechanism to continue sharing knowledge. Therefore we join our efforts and share the events for all communities.
How does it work?
In a series of coming events, Tech Sessions introduces an online format where you will have the opportunity to know about GDGs from Europe, its organizers and developers ecosystems, but also improve your technical skills.
During an hour, each Tech Session will introduce a guest GDG, presenting a little bit about its organizers’ team, interesting facts about its ecosystem, city and even fun facts about them. Moreover, the guest GDG will bring a speaker belonging to its network to present a technical talk, helping you to improve your developers skills with international speakers.
The core team will help the guest GDG with everything that its organizers need, from social snippets to engage participants, to the event’s infrastructure. Therefore, any GDG can co-host an online event easily, even if one GDG has never done it before.
In this view, each session will be branded as GDG Tech Session — GDG <GDG co-host chapter> Edition, in order to recognize the participation of the guest GDG.
Would you like to be our guest? Any GDG, WTM or DSC chapter can apply! Using this form, tell us about your GDG and your proposed speaker and we will arrange the next slot for you!
Would you like to know what a Tech Session looks like?
Join us for our first session on May 19th 19:00 CEST, with the participation of GDG Madeira & WTM Spain, and our guest speaker Megha Bangalore from the Firebase team at Google. After an introduction about these GDG chapters, its organizers and developer ecosystem, Megha will present a very interesting talk about Firebase technologies. Check out the details below.
Megha is an engineering lead at Google working on making Firebase awesome. With many years of experience in distributed systems infrastructure and mobile technologies, Megha has built everything from SIEM platforms to messaging systems. She focuses on helping Firebase users securely engage with, and delight, their end-users. A Bay Area native, Megha received her Master of Arts in CS from Oxford University.
Title: Building secure apps with Firebase.
Description: In a world where security breaches make the front page of newspapers, how do you ensure high velocity without compromising application security? In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the common threat models, and how Firebase can help you secure your apps. We’ll share best practices for using Firebase Authentication, writing Security Rules for least privilege access. Finally, before we open it up for some Q&A, we’ll also talk about some of the cool new features we’ve recently released, to make it even easier to Secure Your App.
Would you like to help promoting the event?
One of the benefits of online events is that everyone can join. If you are the organizer of a GDG, WTM chapter or a developer community, you can help us promote the event, by just sharing the event in your meetup page and social channels. You have here some useful resources. Any questions, let us know.
And of course, we hope you will join us online on May 19th at 19:00 (CEST)!
Everybody is welcome!
tech-sessions.com / #gdgtechsessions / @gdgtechsessions
The GDG Tech Sessions Team.
