30 Days of AoG: An Overview
Experiences as we learnt Actions on Google everyday for 30 days.
This March 2020, I had the most fun and productive 30 days in a long time. Me and four of my friends decided to do a 30 day challenge in which we had to spend at least 1 hour each day for 30 days in learning Actions on Google. It could be anything from watching a video to deploying an app, it just had to be something related to Actions on Google.
How it all started:
The idea struck me when I was trying to figure out a way to spend my free time more productively and also learn AoG. I got into voice tech last year, but in spite of my deep inclination towards this tech, I had not been able to commit to it like I wanted to. So I decided to challenge myself to do a 30-day-challenge. I shared it on my twitter handle and on reddit to share this idea with fellow developers. And then, I also shared it on the AoG slack channel that I had created last year to connect with fellow AoG developers; I also direct messaged some friends I knew through twitter to see if they are interested. Fortunately, Nidhin kumar, Ravi Rupareliya, Sreelal TS and Smit Jethwa jumped aboard! And the best part is, eventually more people like Nikhil Butani and Akshay Pradeep also joined us, but only the first 5 of us stuck till the end.
Experiences:
I was honestly so impressed with myself when I actually completed the challenge. But I had little to do here, the constant dedication of the other team members pushed me to be consistent. Every time I was close to missing a day, I saw the tweets and messages on the slack channel talking about their day ‘x’ of 30 days and that kept me constantly motivated and helped me be on track.
At the end of the 30 days, I thought I’d write a blog post summing up the team’s experiences, so I asked them a few questions for the same and they were graciously happy to oblige.
Here’s a summary of our experiences:
1. Why did you join the #30daysofaog?
Priyam (Me): Although I am very inclined towards Voice app development, I was unable to commit as much time as I wanted to due to work and personal commitments. But I thought, if I start an initiative like a 30days Of AoG I would perhaps be able to motivate myself, which is why I also invited other friends to join me, because I felt that as group we would be able to encourage each other.
Nidhin kumar: To refresh AoG concepts. I had also not worked with a group of members so in order to get that experience I joined this challenge.
Ravi Rupareliya: I have read so many tweets about coding challenges so I also wanted to do it, just to see how it works and what kind of benefits we get.
Smit Jethwa: I wanted to explore AoG and Dialogflow in detail, and #30daysofAog was amazing initiative to learn/explore and teach as well.
Sreelal TS: I totally love creating Actions for the Google Assistant. So, when you (Priyam) reached out asking if I was interested to explore AoG for the next 30 days, I was excited and jumped in. I really thought I can learn things together as a team.
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2. What did you have in mind when you started your 30 days?
Priyam: I have an action called Gratitude Journal that I had worked on last year. But there were a lot of things that I wanted to implement on it, but could not make time for. I especially wanted to focus on conversation design, multi-surface conversation, etc.
Nidhin: Though I have done actions earlier. I have not done anything with Interactive canvas which was a vague part. So I planned to focus on learning the basics of interactive canvas and planned to do a Canvas action.
Ravi: Just to keep learning at-least for 30 days, even if it is half hour of learning, I will do it.
Smit: When I started off, I was a bit in doubt whether I can commit an hour or not, what approach I should follow so all the necessary concepts got covered. But I am happy to say that I managed to invest 2.5 hours on an average!
Sreelal: Before starting, my targets were to learn different features of AoG, like account linking, linking it with Firestore and more. I’m managing the Action for the GDG Kozhikode. So, I thought by the end of this 30 days, I can make it more efficient.
3. Did you achieve what you had in mind when you began your challenge? What did you learn/realise in these 30 days?
Priyam: Yes absolutely! I am very happy with my action ‘Gratitude Journal’ right now. Although there remains a lot of room for improvement, I am happy how it turned out. I even got time to learn the basics of interactive canvas, which I used to dread coming from a non-web-dev background.
Nidhin: I learned a lot in these 30 days. It created a habit as well as discipline to do something better on each day. I have also achieved 90% of what I had planned except for the final Canvas action.
Ravi: Yes, in fact more than that. I thought I will just read documentation or watch YouTube videos, but at the end I was ready with my first interactive canvas app.
Smit: Yes, My aim was to learn blogging, and I start writing blogs. During the #30daysofAog, I wrote a few blog posts, you can read them on my blog. Apart from this, I wanted to explore database connectivity with Dialogflow and Interactive canvas. So I did that as well.
Sreelal: Yesss! Learned a lot! And want to learn more, within the next couple of days I’ll be implementing what I learned! And, yay! Target secure!
4. What are you most proud of learning/doing during these 30days?
Priyam: Several things actually,
a) I am proud of the action called Gratitude Journal
b) I wrote three blogposts about conversation design, but this one’s my favourite
c) And about how we came together as a community to continuously encourage and motivate each other.
Nidhin: When some of our team members started to read the blogs which I have written and got inspired to do things I felt happy that whatever I have contributed is helping someone out there.
- Finding the root cause of the problem when I got stuck with the problem and documenting it was a good one.
- Though I had a fear of doing canvas action, by doing the difficult things repeatedly it made me stronger and I learnt to do it better.
Ravi: I am not from web background, but I ended up developing an Interactive canvas app and deployed the web version all by myself!
Smit: I made connections and virtually connected with many experts! Their words/replies were motivating. One more proud moment is that, I taught Dialogflow to my fellow colleagues, and when you teach something, you get to learn more.
Sreelal: Learned about Interactive Canvas. Thinking of building my own Game Action soon. It’ll be super fun.
5. Any closing thoughts?
Priyam: I had an amazing experience learning for the last 30 days. And I am deeply grateful to my friends who kept me motivated and encouraged till the last day. We as a community definitely want to keep this up and are already talking about the next steps! We’ll keep you posted.
Nidhin: It was a nice initiative. I have to thank you a lot for organizing this.
Though everyone has pushed each other to do things. I think this should not be stopped within 30 days we should start focusing on the next level as a team.
Ravi:- Ready for next challenge!
Smit: I’d to thank you for this initiative. I want to explore more, but I got my exams. I really enjoyed the last 30 days! It was new to me totally. But we did it well, thanks.
Sreelal: We all as a team, explored a lot of AoG. So, I was thinking what if we can sort out what we have learnt and make a “beginner to pro” resources’ list. I guess, it will help ton of people :) Anyway, enjoyed a lot, 30 days was fun learning AoG.
More details:
If you’re interested to see how we spent our 30 days in detail, you can check out our twitter threads where we documented each day: Here’s my thread from day 1, Nidhin Kumar’s thread as well as Ravi Rupareliya’s, followed by Smit Jethwa and Sreelal TS.
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