Google Developer Day 2011 in Berlin

Last weekend I had once again the chance to participate in a Google Developer Day event. While last year’s event took place in Munich and had about 1000 attendees, this year’s was twice as big with more than 2000 guests. Organized by the local GTUG and Google the event was a great opportunity to learn about new tools provided by Google but also to get a chance to chat face to face with the people behind them.

This year’s GDDDE had roughly 5 thematic tracks: Android, Chrome & HTML5, Cloud, Google+ as well as a track dedicated to sessions by two universities in Berlin and Brandenburg. Given that I still don’t have an Android device (although they are getting more and more tempting with ICS) I only attended the Chrome, Cloud and Google+ tracks.

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To be specific, I attended following talks:

• “Making Your Web Apps Accessible Using HTML5 and ChromeVox” by Mark West (more on that later)
• “Using the Google+ APIs” where +Chris Chabot gave a quick rundown of Google’s strategy regarding providing APIs to Google+ step by step
• “Building Integrated Applications on Google’s Cloud Technologies” by +Michael Manoochehri mostly about the prediction API in GAE
• “Privacy-related APIs for Google Chrome Extensions” by +Dominic Battre, +Bernhard Bauer and +Pam G where they gave an introduction of some of the extension APIs (like proxy and content settings) currently in the pipeline for Chrome
• “V8 Performance Tuning Tricks” by +Daniel Clifford
• and last but not least “DevTools Tips and Tricks” by +Ido Green

Mariusz Kaczmarek made a nice collection of the slides where available on Google+.

I also wanted to learn more about how Google plans to integrate Go into GAE but, sadly, that talk was cancelled - which was ironically also one of my highlights of the event due to how it was cancelled, which I wrote about on Google+:

Google is looking for their speaker on “Go on App Engine” at #GDDDE. I have to admit, getting stuck at these nice buffets all over the building is pretty easy :-)

Update: LOL, speaker is in Australia right now :D

All the talks were great: well prepared, interesting and highly entertaining. If I had to choose one of these I’d probably go with the very first one about accessibility features for the best talk of the day. It was just great seeing +Mark West explain accessibility issues in the markup right via ChromeVox.

Once again an awesome event which once again killed my todo list (not that it has even remotely recovered since the last conference) :-) A big “thank you” to all the organizers and everyone who made this nice weekend possible :-)

Python Usergroup Berlin

On Thursay before the GDD there was also a meetup of the Python Usergroup Berlin (PUB) where Wesley Chun from Google gave a couple of talks about various topics from things like writing books with OSS to “Python in the Medical Industry”. A big thank you to the folks behind this usergroup to organize the meetup.

Sight Seeing

Since I had a bit of time before these two events I also went for a little sight seeing tour through Berlin. Sadly the weather didn’t really play nice so the light wasn’t really helping when taking some pictures. If you still want to see them, you can find them here :-)