What I learned at Google Developer Days — Day 2

“GDD India” happened in Bangalore, India on 1st and 2nd of December 2017

This post is about the second day of Google Developer Days

• Day 1
• Day 2

TL;DR

Check out all the recordings of the talks here:

And here are the codes and instructions for all the training sessions:

Google Developer Days 2017_Google Codelabs_codelabs.developers.google.com

Day 2

I decided to take things easy on the second day. So I spent most of my time at the Sandbox.

Sandbox was a place assigned for developers to network. There were also stalls showcasing various Google products like Google Assistant, Android Things, Lighthouse and more.

There was also a place called Codelabs, where devs can just sit back and work on various Coding projects provided by Google.

There were also informal talks happening all throughout the day at the Community Lounge. Here one could either listen to various Googlers talk about various things or just sit back and recharge. 😄

Day 2 Talks

Day 2 Keynote

Sebastian Trzcinski-Clement gave his keynote speech with Geetha Manjunath, who is the CEO of Niramai, a startup for detecting Breast Cancer at a very early stage using AI and Machine Learning based algorithms.

Sowmya and Sebastian

Following Sebastian was Sowmya Subramanian who spoke about inclusive design paradigm.

Say you are designing an algorithm which takes images and checks whether they have human or not. Now if your system learns from images of only light skinned humans, it will not classify dark skinned humans in your image as humans.

To avoid this, your algorithm needs to be usable, accessible, and inclusive for all.

Performance Tooling

Amrit Sanjeev spoke about how User Experience is paramount when measuring an app’s quality. Battery drain, unresponsive or buggy UI, slow install speeds, and high RAM usage lead to poor user experience which can in turn lead to negative reviews on the Play Store.

Amrit also talks about the new tools that have been added to Android Studio and how they can be used to greatly improve their application.

Building Production IoT Devices with Android Things

Wayne Piekarski in this session talked about Android Things, Google’s platform to build IoT products with the power and security of Android.

In Android Things, developers can use familiar tools such as Android Studio and the Android SDK to easily develop IoT software, and scale the hardware from a single prototype to production.

From Startups to large companies, anyone can build commercial products at scale. Wayne explained the steps needed to implement Android Things into your workflow.

PWA + AMP = Easy for Users and Developers Alike

Ben Morss talked about PWAs enable app-like experiences on mobile web. Accelerated Mobile Projects (AMP) makes the web fast for users and simple for developers.

Putting PWAs and AMP together gives us an easy way to build a fast, beautiful, immersive web app.

Mobile in Context: Design Principles of Flow and Navigation

As new and new technologies are advancing almost every day, the experience provided by these technologies proves that it is a really great time to get into mobile and web app ecosystems.

I had the chance to hear Jenny Gove speak about how today it is really important for our design and development of mobile to fit the users’ ways of of working.

The designs we create need to be intuitive and polished. Though there are new technologies coming out every day that are making things easier for us, a developer need to understand the needs of a user and accordingly create experience that stands up to the users’ needs.

Here Jenny discussed some of the principles around navigation and flow, and how user research can improve mobile app design.

What’s New with the Google Assistant and Advanced Topics

Silvano Luciani talks about all the new advanced features of Google Assistant.

Through Google Assistant, one can now implement payments, transactions, and location for shopping experiences, transfer the conversation to a different surface, and much more.

Among the many new features, Google Assistant now provides support for Smart Home Devices and can integrate with your own IoT devices.

Running in the Background

“Background” is an overloaded term in the world of Android. It is used to describe things in different context, such as running off the UI thread while an app is in the foreground, running for a very short time after your app goes to the background, running for a short time on receipt of a high priority FCM data message, or running scheduled jobs.

Nasir Khan in his talk spoke about some of the best practices along with solutions for various use cases that will work today and in the future.

From Website To Progressive Web App

In this talk about PWAs, Pete LePage talked about where one can start, what to implement, and how to prioritise and PWA techniques.

Google Cloud IoT Core Technical Deep Dive

Gus Class talks about the high-level features of the Google Cloud IoT Core Product.

In this talk, I learnt about all the underlying Google Could products that make up the Cloud Solution and how they let you add IoT capabilities to your products at scale, for both data ingress and analytics.

Building Rich Media Experience with Android

Great content is the foundation for a great media app, but a great user experience requires leveraging the right set of media and user-interface features on Android.

Paul R. Saxman and Daniel Galpin cover what it takes to build an outstanding media app experience using platform features such as the Android Media Framework, picture-in-picture, MediaStyle notifications, and the new Channels and Programs API on Android TV.

Also covered in this session was what’s new in high performance audio for Android when creating media creation apps.

Android meets TensorFlow

Kaz Sato and Anitha Vijayakumar talk about all the amazing things that a developer can do by combining your Android with TensorFlow!

TensorFlow is a multipurpose machine learning framework. TensorFlow can be used anywhere from training huge models across clusters in the cloud, to running models locally on an embedded system like your phone.

Kaz Sato also shows us how to create custom image recognition model, how to optimize your model, how to compress your model, and how to run it in a pre-made Android app.

Building an Android Instant App

As a user, we probably know how frustrating it feels when the apps takes to load or even install in the first place. The most simple solution to this issue is to shrink the APK size.

Smaller APKs not only provide faster downloads for users, but the refactoring process often simplifies your codebase.

This simplification process prepares your app for Android Instant Apps: An evolution in app sharing and discovery. Android Instant Apps allows Android users to run your apps instantly, without installation.

Android Instant Apps, which can be opened from URLs and provide a native app experience without the friction of a full install.

Lyla Fujiwara and Anirudh Dewani talks about the many tools that are available to cut down your APK size, modularize your app, and build your first Android Instant App.

Fundamentals of Google Cloud Platform: A Guided Tour

There’s a lot to understand in cloud computing and Marc Cohen and Mete Atamel helped me in this session with a hands-on, practical guided tour of the amazing scope and depth of problems that can be solved in cloud computing using Google Cloud Platform.

Internationalisation and Structured Data for Search

Making a multilingual or international website work well in search is a very complex job. I learnt this from Aaseesh Marina’s talk where he gave some very critical insights on this subject along with adding structured data for search engines.

Live Coding an App with Cloud Functions and Cloud Firestore for Firebase

Firebase and Google Cloud Platform together allow developers to build extraordinary mobile and web apps quickly. Mike McDonald, Dan McGrath ☁ and Todd Burner crafted an app live on-stage and demonstrated how to create a great user experience using Firebase.

Further, I learnt how to use Cloud APIs without having to spin up servers or manage infrastructure. Firebase makes it easier to build apps, and Google Cloud Platform makes even more easier to scale.

Polymer and Web Components

Taylor Savage talked about Web Components and how they are baked into the web platform that let you create own custom, fully-encapsulated HTML elements.

I learnt what Web Components are, what they let you do, and how you can use the Polymer library to build your own Web Components and apps that are lighter, faster and use less data.

Serverless Computing with Firestore, Cloud Functions and G Suites APIs

This talk by Patrick Martinent introduced me to the new Cloud Firestore database, which was recently announced by Google’s Firebase team.

I also learnt about some of the specific use cases and features that are making Firestore an essential component of the platform. There was also a live demonstration of how easy it is to leverage G Suite APIs directly from Firebase Cloud Functions.

The Power and Flexibility of the New Google Sheets API

In today’s world of big data, spreadsheets are still as powerful and flexible as ever. Launched at Google I/O 2016, the Google Sheets API can do much more than any of its predecessors.

In this talk, Wesley Chun demonstrated a wide variety of ways to interact with Sheets, including migrating data from SQL databases, modifying data, cell formatting, and much more.

SEO: Common Issues and Misconceptions

Many websites often rely on traffic from web searches. In this session, Malik Mairaj Syed covered some of the common issues and misconceptions regarding search engine optimizations (SEO) and also gave some tips on what to look out for when you hire someone else to do SEO.

Search and JavaScript Sites

Amrit Sanjeev talked about PWA and other JavaScript-based website configurations and how they can be shown in Google Search by keeping a lookout for a few critical aspects.

Google Developer Program Lightning Talks

This talk featured six curated lightning talks on Google Developer programs that are targeted at various stages of the lifecycle of a developer from a student, certified professional, community leader/expert, entrepreneur and finally to a mentor.

The lightning talks were delivered by the actual practitioners of the Google Developer programs and moderated by Karthik Padmanabhan.

And that’s a Wrap!

Phew! Finally I am done! 😆

GDD was a tiring but a very great experience for me. I am really grateful about being part of this event, especially since this was the first time that GDD was hosted in India. I amount of things that I learned here can only be described by the picture of a vessel that is overflowing with water.

I am Rajat S, Technical Content Writer at GeekyAnts. Aspiring Coder who has a long way to go. A Die-Hard DC Comics Fan who loves Marvel Movies. Known for multi tasking.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully this was helpful! Be sure to 👏 and follow me here and on Twitter and Facebook to stay updated about new posts from me!