Sunday, December 5, 2010

Google Developer Day 2010 Prague

It took me some time before I finally started own blog.
The idea appeared after Google Developer Day in Prague which I attended. It made a significant impression on me so that I wanted to share my experience with others.

And how to reach others better than in the Internet :)

I stayed in Prague already on Monday 15.11.2010 just to sightsee a little. I found quite a pleasent and not very expensive Emma Hostel just in the Old Town center. I costed around 9 euro per night.

The conference took part on Tuesday

Organizers really fulfilled my expectation, even more, I was surprised by the amount of work they've put into this event.
Not mentioning the educative value, there was a lot of food waiting for the participants, especially for the end of the conference - the party time ;)
In the menu you could find pasta, meats, pancakes, salads, fruits, beer, ice-cream... everyone could find something for himself.

As for the topics of the conference - at the very beginning Eric Thalome made a Keynote in which he pointed out 3 main trends in the recent Google politics: mobile applications, could computing, Google Chrome and browser extensions. These topics were later extended through the rest of the day.

Below I give impression after the presentations I was attending to.

Google Web Toolkit (201):

This was supposed to be advanced level speach but in fact it was mainly an introduction to GWT pointing out it's advantages over writing directly in JavaScript, such as: better debugging options, less error prone, syntax check at compilation time, more efficient and portable code (working well in all main browsers). An interesting for me in this presentation however was pointing out the new things that were added in GWT 2.1 such as a new, more efficient than RPC mechanism for remote procedure call - RequestFactory.

Google Chrome Extensions (101):

Very interesting presentation. Before I had no chance to see possibilities of Chrome in terms of writing extensions with all the advantages of HTML5

Practical HTML5 (201):

A continuation of previously mentioned presentation showing possiblities of HTML5.
What till now was accessible only using Flash, now can be easily done in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. At The same time we do not loose page content visibility for web searching robots. Unfortunatelly HTML5 is fully supported only by Chrome. There is a hope other browsers will follow soon.

Chrome Dev Tools (201):

Chrome Dev Tools embedded in Chrome browser by default makes web debugging easier than ever before. We can set breakpoints in HTML code, see the speed of loading each component separately on page and check which of then slows down our page drastically.

VC Investment For Your Company:

Interesting discussion panel. Invited guests were answering questions like: how to convince Venture Capital organisations to our project, which mistakes to omit.
Among all advices, we should make a precise market analysis and answer ourselves questions such as:

  • why is my idea better than others

  • which market problems does it solve

  • how many peaople suffer the problem that we are going to solve

  • how much money precisely do we need to realise the project


The analysis should be at least on the level of precise business plan.

Avast CTO was talling a storey about the beginnings of the company in Chech Republic. How it was set up by biologist and nuclear phisicist who had first written an anti-virus software for a virus that appeared at that time in their university (viruses were not so popular at that time). Then they decided to share theirs solution among other network users and found a great interest. The business was prospering well before the European Union didn't open it's market, when vast of their customers were inhaled by western corporations, which already had their own anti-virus solutions. Avast faced a huge competition and had to change their policy. What they did was making product open source.
Now their users could translate the software themselves to other languages. It came to the point when Chech Rep. takes only 3% of Avast market while the most of the users comes from France. This was a success story of Avast.

Google Apps Marketplace:Integrate and Sell Your Cloud Apps to Google Apps Customers (101)

I survived only till the middle of this presentation. Then I moved to the parallel one:

Authentication on the World Wide Web (201):

The reason for switching was to many details connected to specific technology with which I had nothing to do - too many examples of how to implement OpenID in PHP language.
The second presentation was more directed to the problem of Single Sign On in general, without diving into any particular programming language.

At the end of the conference there was a party time :) life music performed by DJ with accompany of saxophone, beer, sweets, wine...

During the day we could also play a little with exposed mobile devices with Android installed.
There were phones and pads. The one I liked the most was Samsung i9000 as its touch-keyboard seemed to be the most user friendly among others - not too much sensitive and not too much hard.

There was also an opportunity to win Lego Mindstorms.
During the whole day there were papers with 2D-codes spread around (on doors, floor, tables.. ).
The one who gathered the most of the codes and sent them through WIFI won the main prize.

Pity that some presentations (led by natives) were only in Chech language.
Pity also that till now there was no such conference in Poland. We're waiting for this day to come :)

Some pics from the conference can be seen at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Marcin.Piczkowski/GoogleDeveloperDay2010Prague?authkey=Gv1sRgCIeKnomYy8jt6gE&feat=directlink