GDG London

GDG London in 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 12:48:00 +0000

2013 was a busy year for us in London, seeing our team grow to larger than ever before and organizing the most events we've had in a single year. In annual tradition, I'll be looking back at a few of our highlights from the year - add your own in the comments!

We kicked off the year with one of our most ambitious events Design in Action, a two day mash up of designers and developers to work together to create better looking apps, with some of our favourite speakers giving talks on app design.

After a couple of meetups on Google+ Sign-in and Google Apps Script, we began preparation for our third I/O Extended event. As both myself and our new organizer Radek were both flying out to Google I/O in San Francisco, our remaining organizers in London joined forces with the Londroid group to put on a groundbreaking I/O Extended event, complete with Android chess, Chrome racing and an Ice Cream truck.

June became one of our busiest months with a quick succession of meetups on the Google Cloud Platform, Google Maps Mobile APIs and the YouTube APIs. After all that we were glad to have Hoi Lam join organization team and help run the meetups that followed.

We had a full house for our meetup Android for Game Developers, with a number of Google Developer Advocates joining us to give talks Android 4.3, Play Games and Google+ Sign-in.

Our next meetup was the very next day, with Mandy Waite from Google speaking on How (and why) to build your web site with Google App Engine.

As the 2013 DevFest season started around the world, we began our preparations for our own DevFest London 2013. Building on the previous year, we added a second track of talks, to cover a huge range of technologies from Android KitKat, WebRTC and Chrome DevTools to HTML5, AppEngine and Google+ - plus a lot of pizza, beer and burritos! On the second day we held our first ever code lab day, giving attendees an intensive hands on AppEngine and Compute Engine.

We had time for one last meetup on What's new in Dart Language with Chris Bucket before hanging up our GDG T-Shirts for the year.

We'll be announcing our first 2014 meetups shortly, so keep an eye on our Google+ page or register for our mailing list from our www.gdg-london.com.

With our largest team ever I think we can make this year even better, but we still need your help - please get in touch to let us know what you'd like to see. Interested in becoming an organizer? We'd love to have you on board, so let us know!

Meetup this week - What's new in Dart language?

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 20:57:00 +0000

Now that *Dart* version 1.0 is out, the language has stabilized, it's a great time to get building *real applications* in Dart. Dart's mission is to solve two key problems facing web developers and app users - that of structure and performance in complex web application.

+Dart 1.0 has a rich ecosystem of tools, packages and tutorials and you'll see how you can get up and running with this familiar, easy to learn language.

When coupled with Web Components, a new way of building web applications by treating everything as an element you can use Google's Polymer web component project to build modular, fast Dart applications that run in all modern browsers.

Join us and +Chris Buckett at +Campus London to discover how you can make the most of Dart and its tools.

Register from http://whats-new-in-dart.eventbrite.com/?aff=gplus

GDG DevFest London 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 10:14:00 +0000

The second DevFest London, part of the global GDG DevFest season. An exciting two days of Google Developer talks, hacking and fun things to try out, as well as plenty of free time to eat food, drink beer and and meet others developing with Google technology.

Friday, 1st November 2013 - Talks on Android, Chrome, Google+, Google Cloud Platform and fun activities.

Saturday, 2nd November 2013 - Hands on session / code labs on Google Cloud Platform.

Register now from http://devfestlondon13.eventbrite.co.uk/ . For more information and complete schedule visit http://www.gdg-london.com/devfest/

Meetups next week: Android for Game Developers and App Engine

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 10:52:00 +0000

We have two meetups coming up next week, take your pick, or join us at both!

Android for game developers with Google

August 15th 19:00 at Skills Matter

Come along to hear the latest on Android for gaming developers from Google's Developer relations team. Find out more about Android 4.3, Play Games and Google+ Sign-in.

More details and registration from http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/7707763127.

How (and why) to build your web site using Google App Engine

August 16th 13:00 at Google Campus

Learn how to develop your site on top of Google's powerful technical infrastructure using App Engine.

More details and registration from http://app-engine-campus.eventbrite.com/.

Meetup This Evening: Dive into the YouTube APIs

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 12:47:00 +0000

Have you ever wonder how you can use YouTube APIs on your project? Or you're already using YouTube API and want to dive deeper into it?

Join us in Skills Matter this evening at 7pm to hear Jeff Posnick from the YouTube Developer Relations team walk through all the different playback, upload, discovery, and curation options available for both desktop and mobile applications as part of the YouTube API platform.

Register and see more info on http://dive-into-youtube-apis.eventbrite.com.

Developing on the Google Cloud Platform with Java

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 17:39:00 +0000

Join us for an evening of talks about developing on the Google Cloud Platform with Java, organized by GDG London and London Java Community.

We'll start with a talk from Roman Kirillov a Software Engineer at Google, who will be discussing how to use Google Cloud Endpoints to build third party APIs on AppEngine.

The second talk will be from Mandy Waite a Developer Advocate at Google, who will be talking about the pros and cons of running JVM languages such as Groovy and Scala on Google App Engine

We'll be meeting in Skills Matter on July 10th from 18:30. Find more info and register from Eventbrite and drop your comments and photos on the G+ Event.

New Meetup: Dive into the Google Maps Mobile APIs

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:36:00 +0000

First off, a big welcome to Radek Simko, who joins GDG London from Prague. He was a superstar of the successful GDG community in the Czech Republic and we're really excited to have him on board in the UK.

If you're interested in developing for Android or iOS and use Google Maps API for mobile, we hope you'll be able to join us for our next meetup on June 25th at Skills Matter and dive into these APIs with Google Developer Advocates from Google Maps team.

Expected Agenda

18:30 - Registration & networking (pizza & drinks included)
19:00 - Talk from Google Maps Developer Advocate team
20:00 - Networking with Maps DA team and others (drinks included)

Find more info and register from Eventbrite and drop your comments and photos on the G+ Event.

We're hitting the ground running this Summer with another meetup planned for July 10th on the Google Cloud Platform and Java, more details on that one to be announced soon.

New Meetup: I/O Refreshed

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:11:00 +0000

Let's get together for drinks on Tuesday 21st May week to share our I/O and I/O Extended experiences.

We've reserved space in the Giant Robot in Clerkenwell and drinks will be provided. No need to register but please accept the G+ event so we can get an idea of numbers.

Hack something awesome during I/O? Bring it with you!

https://plus.google.com/events/cmqd2ohgmjoa4v63gpd89f2dgco

Google Apps Script Meetup

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 14:31:00 +0000

Join us in Skills Matter on April 17th in Skills Matter (EC1V 7DP) to discover how to use Google Apps Script to extend Google Apps, with a talk from Google's Arun Nagarajan.

Google Apps Script is a cloud based JavaScript environment which allows you to write powerful applications and workflows to automate, extend and integrate with Google Apps such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, Sheets and more. The development is entirely within a browser and its free and easy to get started. Come learn all the capabilities of Google Apps Script and walk away being able to write your first script.

Agenda

18:30 - Registration
18:45 - Intro to GDG
19:00 - Arun Nagarajan, Google Apps Script - JavaScript in the cloud to extend Google Apps
20:00 - Q&A then head to local pub (The Slaughtered Lamb?)

Register from the Skills Matter website - http://goo.gl/Wu3hh.

Update on I/O Extended London 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:26:00 +0000

We know a lot of people are looking forward to I/O Extended in London, so this is quick post about GDG London's plans this year.

Due to limited availability of GDG organizers in London during I/O, we're handing over the reigns to Londroid this year, who will be handling registration via their Meetup page, which is also the best source for up to date news:

http://www.meetup.com/android/events/109054662

Registration is already full, but we're working with Londroid and Google to try and find capacity to fit as many people as we can to make this a great event for everyone who couldn't get to I/O. Add yourself to the waitlist and we'll have more details very soon.

Update 27/04/13

Thanks to Google and Campus London we now have more space for I/O Extended London! Registrations have re-opened, but they're already filling up quickly, so register soon if you plan to join.

We've set up a Google+ event here where you can post what you're hoping to see, and let us know what you're up to during the I/O Extended (upload photos!). As before, you'll need to register from the Londroid Meetup page to reserve a space.

Incorporating the latest features of G+ with Google

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:43:00 +0000

Whether you’re building an app for Android, iOS or the web, users can now sign in to your app with Google, and bring along their Google+ info for an upgraded experience. It’s simple, it’s secure, and it prohibits social spam. Come along to Campus London on the 11th of March to take a deep dive into what you can do with Google+ Sign-In and the Google APIs. Understand the best ways of implementing them and see how to integrate it into your projects and codebase.

More details and registration at http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/5679984988.

This event is organized by Google, please use the contact details on the event page for queries.

Devoxx London 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:34:00 +0000

On March 26th-27th Devoxx is coming to the UK for the first time, a two-day conference run by developers for developers with world-class speakers, including some great talks on Google technology.

A number of GDGs from around the world will be joining, it would be great to see some members of our London community come along too!

Find more details at http://www.devoxx.com/display/UK13/Home and register from https://reguk.devoxx.com/public#UK13.

Design in Action: Photos, videos and wrap-up

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 13:56:00 +0000

Design in Action was our first meetup of 2013, with attendance split between designers and developers to help create better looking apps, and tickets allocated to women only to support GDG Women.

We kicked off on Friday with three talks to get everyone thinking about app design, with Marie and Kevin from Novoda and Alice and Nikki from Mint Digital. Videos of all three talks as well as the Jam intro can be found on our YouTube channel.

On Saturday we had a full day app-jam, with every team consisting of at least one developer and designer. The result was some of the best apps to come out of a jam I've seen, from Onnect's innovative use of Google Cloud messaging to create shared intents across devices, to Gridrop's incredibly useful tool for measuring the size of app layout elements on different devices.

Picking a winning team was difficult, but for their mix of well thought out design and modern technology, we awarded the top spot to team Place.me, for their app that pulled in local geographical data and convert it to great looking infographics. You can watch their full presentation here - if anyone from the Google Now team is reading, they should take note!

You can find more photos of the event here on Google+. I hope we'll have more events like this in the future, but for our next event we'll probably arrange a more casual talk+drinks evening meetup, most likely in March. See you soon!

Design in Action

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:52:00 +0000

Our next meetup will be Design in Action, a jam that mashes up designers and developers to create apps that combine innovative designs and technology. Attendees will be split into teams with at least one designer and developer - your app will need both great looks and functionality for a chance of winning!

Location: Google Campus
Friday 25th January: 6pm - 10pm
Saturday 26th January: 10am - 7pm

50% of tickets are allocated to women only as part of the new GDG Women initiative. This is a great opportunity for women interested Google technology to get involved with GDGs.

You can find the full schedule and register from http://designinaction.eventbrite.com/.

2012 Year in Review

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 14:07:00 +0000

After a not-so-short hiatus at the end of last year, 2012 started slow before seeing incredible growth for GDG London (previously London GTUG). We held a record 8 meetups over 11 days, saw attendance of
some events reach over 200 and now have more than 1600 followers on Google+.

Along with rebranding to GDG London we launched a new website and logo, and also joined other UK cities for the launch of GDGs.co.uk. These are a few of our highlights from the year, add your own in the comments!

Our first event of 2012 was in partnership with Startup Weekend, a 'bootcamp' for their March event to introduce attendees to some great Google technologies such as Google+, Places and native Android.

Nawaid Shamim joined GDG London for this event for much-needed help in co-organizing the group.

In May we joined Google's Dart team to put on our biggest event to date 'Happy Hour', a 2-day hackathon to get to grips with Google's latest web programming language.

This was also our first event in the newly opened Google Campus, which would go on to become our home for most events in the year, including a great talk on Google Drive SDK in June.

The last week of June saw everything change for us, as we rebranded to GDG London and became part of the new Google Developers site, as well as relaunching our own site with a new logo.

To kick things off we held a massive I/O Extended event over three floors of Campus, with more than 200 developers attending to see announcements and sessions from Google's annual developer conference. We even had a few of the announced Nexus 7s of our own to play with - a surprise even our GDG organizers weren't expecting!

It wasn't long before we started planning our next big event, DevFest London, which kicked off the global DevFest season. We were lucky to have a great line up of Google speakers, as well as giving community members a chance to show of their projects.

On the second day we held one of our most successful hackathons, with over 10 teams developing some awesome projects during the day.

Towards the end of the year we had a few other meetups, including a day of developing for Chrome OS, an intro to building big data applications and a fun visit to the Chrome Web Lab.

We also joined other cities to launch GDGs.co.uk - a new site to discover GDGs in the UK and Ireland, and also collect achievement badges.

We'll be getting started early in 2013 with a hackathon on January 25th-26th - we're confirming some details, but will announce this soon.

I'll be aiming to hold bi-monthly meetups this year, if you want to get involved with these or help organize more, please get in touch. I think we set the bar high in 2012 but with your help we can grow even bigger this year!

Pass the Salt: Native Client Hackathon

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:19:00 +0000

Native Client is an open-source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly execute native compiled code inside the browser. Take a part in the next evolution of web programming and begin hacking on Native Client.

CANCELLED

Due to unworkable scheduling changes for the speakers/facilitators, we are forced to cancel the Native Client hackathon. We are still planning to arrange a similar event at some point next year and we will keep you updated once we come up with a new date.

Keep these dates saved though, as we still plan of having a GDG London meetup during this time. We'll post new details soon - suggestions for content are welcome.

Launching GDGs.co.uk

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 16:31:00 +0000

GDG London are excited to join GDG Birmingham, Edinburgh and Dublin as launch cities for GDGs.co.uk - a new website to discover Google Developer Groups in the UK and Ireland.

Along with group and event listings, the site introduces the new UK GDG Achievement Badges. These are custom-made enamel badges that you can earn by completing one of four tasks - attend 10 UK GDG meetups, visit 3 different cities, help organize an event or be awarded one as a prize. All events from this week are valid, so start working your way to a badge by attending your next local GDG meetup.

We look forward to seeing more GDGs added to the site, so if there isn't one near you yet or you're organizing another Google-related group that you'd like to turn into a GDG, get in touch!

Pass the Salt: Native Client Hackathon

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Sprinkle C/C++ into your web app at Pass the Salt, our first Native Client hackathon at Google Campus on January 25th-27th.

Native Client is an open-source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly execute native compiled code inside the browser. Take a part in the next evolution of web programming and begin hacking on Native Client. If you are eager to find out more and see what is possible on the web, come and join us.

Find the full schedule and registration at http://passthesalt.eventbrite.com/

Chrome Web Lab Visit

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:57:00 +0000

The Chrome Web Lab is a series of interactive Chrome Experiments made by Google that bring the extraordinary workings of the internet to life. Find out more here: http://www.chromeweblab.com/

GDG London will be visiting on November 21st, join us!

9:45am - Meet in the cafe for coffee/light breakfast

10:30am - Visit the Chrome Web Lab

11:15am - End of Web Lab Visit (rest of the science museum is open till 18:00 if you wish to stay)

Android Event Livestream

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:10:00 +0000

The Android team are announcing something on October 29th, will it be a new Nexus or the next version of Android? We have no idea, but will be watching the live stream to find out.

Join us in Campus from 1.30pm (stream starts at 2pm), snacks/drinks will be provided. Register in advance from http://androidoct12.eventbrite.com.

UPDATE - We're sorry to say that this event has been cancelled due to a hurricane in New York.

Droidcon London 2012 + GDG Discount

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:05:00 +0000

Droidcon returns to London on October 25th & 26th for its fourth consecutive year! 1000+ talented developers and designers!

And this year's Droidcon is a celebration of the 5 years of Android and a glimpse in the future of the platform! No worry we won't have any futurists - that's not what Droidcon is about!

3 great keynote speakers will talk about where they're bringing Android in the next 5 years:

· Julie Uhrman CEO of OUYA. The first Android based gaming console was launched on Kickstarter earning funding ($8.5 million dollars!) and fans. The Kickstarter darling will ship to gamers in March 2013.

· Paresh Patel Founder of Vendscreen, whose Android vending machine is changing the way people buy... just about anything!

· Frederic Albinet Marketing Group Manager at Parrot, having flown the world with their phone controlled AR.Drone quadricopter, Parrot have launched their Asteroid series of Android based in-car entertainment devices

But Droidcon is more than keynote speakers...

Barcamp, an ‘unconference’-style day where delegates are invited to present short talks based on their professional interests. Everyone's participation is encouraged: debates, presentations, experience sharing, are all welcome.

Democamp, an event to launch and showcase the latest Android apps, attended by press, investor and the community. Of course, we round it all up with the Droidcon London party!

Conference, With 50 speakers from industry experts to large Android players such as Barnes & Nobles, Sony, Intel, Airpush, Qualcomm and many more. Mark Murphy (CommonsWare), Cyril Mottier (Prixing) on the Fly-in app, Matt Gaunt (Google) on developing for Google TV, Corey Latislaw (Chariot Solutions) on Fragments, and Simon Cross (Facebook) on Open Graph, Julian Harty on test automation, Sameer Baroova (Electronic Arts) on being successful with Android games, Lars Hard (Expertmaker) on integrating AI in your app... and many more!

Hackathon to celebrate Android’s 5th anniversary in due style with the VHack Android hackathon, a European competition bringing Europe's best Android developers to London

For more details, check out http://uk.droidcon.com .

And as a special present 30% off the ticket's price using the following promocode: GDG-DROIDCON

Building Big Data Apps...Slides/Photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 11:16:00 +0000

This week we met up in Campus for "Building Big Data Applications with Google's Cloud Platform", from Google's Michael Manoochehri with an extra talk on Compute Engine from Marc Cohen. We have some photos on the Google+ event page.

If you missed out, have a look at Michael's slides here. You might also be interested in the latest Google Developers Live video, recorded from the new London GDL studio.

We'll announce the next GDG London event soon, but in the meantime we'll be at the Chromebook users meetup next Tuesday in Campus, come along to chat with us about Chrome OS. I'll also be at Barcamp Liverpool next weekend to talk about GDGs and building developer communities if you can make it up north it'd be great to see some of you there!

DevFest London - Photos and Hackathon Entries

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 19:32:00 +0000

Last weekend we kicked off the DevFest season with an amazing two-days of Google tech talks, lightning demos and hacking in Campus London.

We had a record number of people posting on Google+, we even managed to get #devfestlondon trending on the Friday! Loads of people were adding photos to the Google+ event, we've collected together the best ones in this album.

The Saturday hackathon was one of the best we've had, with over 10 great entries making it really hard to pick a winner (this photo of the judging says it all!). We eventually decided to split the 5 Chromebox prizes between 3 teams, these are the entries that we had links for:

Team Laser Explosion (winner)
Talking Location (winner)
S Video (winner)
YumBattle
Projector
Tron Square
Hispanos
AOSP.TV

Our next meetup is Building Big Data Applications on October 4th, plus we have a unique, fun meetup to announce soon, as well as another big hackathon coming up - keep up to date with us on Google+!

Building Big Data Applications with Google's Cloud Platform

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:19:00 +0000

Over the years, Google has developed a number of technologies to process the massive amounts of data generated by its web scale applications. Google has opened up many of these technologies to developers, allowing them to build their own applications using our infrastucture.

In this talk, we will demonstrate how you can use Google's Cloud Platform to analyse terabytes of data in seconds using Google's BigQuery, collect data at web scale using the Datastore (Google App Engine's NoSQL data backend), and store large static files in Google Cloud Storage. We will also take a look at how to put all of these pieces together to create an end-to-end Big Data application using the App Engine Pipeline API and MapReduce library for App Engine.

The talk will be given by Michael Manoochehri, a Google engineer supporting developers who work with Google's Cloud and Data platforms.

The meetup will be on October 4th at 6:15pm in Campus London (http://www.campuslondon.com).

See http://bigdataapps.eventbrite.com/ for more info and registration.

technologies

DevFest London

noreply@blogger.com (Mark) — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 15:29:00 +0000

GDG London and Google are putting on the first ever DevFest in London, an exciting two days of Google Developer talks, hacking and fun things to try out, as well as plenty of free time to eat food, drink beer and and meet others developing with Google technology.

Friday 14th September from 9am - Talks on Chrome, Android, Google+, Google TV, Drive and more, plus lightning talks and fun activities.

Saturday 15th September from 10am - Hackathon, with categories based on the talks from Friday.

See http://london.devfest.info for more info and registration.