DevFest AU: A week in recap

Over the five days from June 28th-July 2nd, we welcomed more than 300 developers, representing around 150 companies and universities, through our doors for DevFest AU 2010. We learned about what they're working on, and talked to them about what we do day to day here at Google.

The week started with a Wave day on Monday - chock full of talks on the Wave product, platform, and protocol. Dan Peterson, a product manager on Wave, gave a recap of the last year, and then I continued on to provide an overview of the Wave APIs, with a deep dive on Robots and Gadgets. Greg D'alesandre ( known as "Dr. Wave") and Alan Green gave a reprise of their popular I/O talk on Wave and Enterprise. After lunch, gave a demo of a non-AppEngine robot, running off a slicehost server and using the Django framework. Seth Covitz, visiting from the Mountain View office, talked about the Wave Media APIs, showing off the very cool "Wave->PowerPoint->Wave" demo. I then showed WaveThis, and demonstrated using it on then Blogger, Posterous, and Wordpress platforms. Dhanji Prasanna, a Sydney engineer known for his popular Guice framework, talked about the Embed API, and then gave a sneak preview of WaveLite, an alternative client for Google Wave that is built entirely on our Wave Data APIs. He finished his deep dive of WaveLite by whipping together an iPad-friendly UI for the client, and running it all on AppEngine. We expect to open-source WaveLite soon, so that developers can run it themselves. We finished off the talks with a focus on open-source and federation, with UNSW grad Alex North talking about Operational Transforms, and Anthony Baxter discussing the current state of the open-sourced code in the wave-protocol project. We spent the final hours of the day hacking, and saw some cool demos from developers - a pure-HTML wave client written in Perl with goals of accessibility, a real-estate listings robot, "Dr. Evil" bot, and a geo-semantic analysis bot.

Greg D'alesandre AKA Dr Wave presenting at DevFest AU 2010

On Tuesday we brought together a large crowd of developers interested in Apps and App Engine. Don Dodge, well known for his work in the startup scene, kicked off the day talking about the Google Apps Marketplace. Shihab Hamid, an engineer from Atlassian (just down the footbridge from us), showed off their integration of JIRA, an issue tracking tool, into Google Apps marketplace. Geoff McQueen, the CEO of Hiive Systems, explained why and how their product AffinityLive is integrating with Apps Marketplace, and discussed what they learned about Google APIs from the integration. Check out his guest post on the Google Australia blog for more info. After lunch, Patrick Chanezon, who's worked in developer relations since before it even existed, talked about App Engine for Business, Google Storage, and the BigTable and Prediction APIs, showing a cool demo of using the prediction API with his delicious bookmark data to predict the tags he'd choose for a particular webpage. We spent the next few hours hacking on Python and Java App Engine codelabs, and watched as developers showed off what they've done in App Engine - like evonyurl.com, shoutmessage.appspot.com, and beste.st. We hope to see more Aussie developers trying out App Engine for their cloud computing needs, and integrating their business apps with Apps Marketplace - if you do, let us know!

Developer advocate Don Dodge flew down from the US for the event

Wednesday was all about developing for Chrome and modern browsers in general, using HTML5 and other up-and-coming standards. Eric Bidelman started off the day with a whirlwind intro to the current state of the web, and then Jeremy Orlow, a Chrome engineer and Webkit committer from the London office, talked through the interactive HTML5 slides deck. After lunch, Eric gave an intro to developing Chrome extensions, and then welcomed Sputnik agency, a local web development house, to talk about three extensions they created: MenuLog, LastTix, and Qantas Frequent Flyers. Menulog wrote here about the experiences. Eric finished up the talks with a discussion of the various techniques and tools for making web apps faster, like Closure Tools, Chrome Frame, and Native Client. As with the previous days, we then spent a few hours hacking, with many developers trying their hand at using the video tag in the Video app codelab. At the end of hacking, we saw demos from developers of "anything they'd made that had to do with HTML5 or Chrome" - like a webcam HTML5 calibration app, a localStorage-based expanding rectangle demo, and a Chrome extension for reloading webpages at specified intervals - all very cool stuff.

Thursday was Social day and we tried out a different format, with talks in the morning and a full five hours of hacking in the afternoon. Timothy Jordan and Will Norris spent the morning talking through the Buzz APIs and the open standards they're based on, like Activity Streams, Salmon Protocol, and PubSubHubBub. In the afternoon, they introduced starter projects - a Python App Engine app for displaying a twitter stream, and a PHP app for doing the same. Then a room full of developers got to hacking, many on the starter projects, and many on projects of their own invention. After a round of drinks, it was finally time for demo time, and we were super impressed with what developers had come up with in the relatively short amount of time - a Buzz stream -> jQuery lightbox viewer, a real estate Buzz stream complete with maps and photos, an iPhone-compatible "iBuzzLightyear" search app, a PHP app showing the top "Buzz words" in the world cities, a Python app that performed a topic cluster analysis on Buzz streams and automatic tag cloud generation, and more.

For our final day on Friday, all about Maps API v3, we followed a similar format. In the morning, Luke Mahe and Daniels Lee started off with an awesome tag-team presentation that walked through the steps of creating a coffee-locating map in Sydney, from a simple map to a geo-located App Engine app. Jaidev Soin, from local Sydney startup Travellr, presented a talk about their geo-located questions and answers site, and their own use of Maps API v3. Then David Day and Jez Fletcher, two Sydney engineers on the Maps API team, reprised their popular I/O talk on customizing maps, from custom zombie markers to the new and very cool map styling options. After lunch, Daniels introduced three codelabs, and the room full of developers (and MANY power plugs) got to hacking. Halfway through hacking, Sydney engineer James McGill gave a talk about Google Fusion Tables, a new way to upload geographic data to Google and easily visualize it on a map. At demo time, developers showed us they were paying attention to all the new features talked about in the morning, as each demo played with one of our recently announced features - we saw a McDonalds-styled map plotting a round trip of all the Maccas in Australia, a map visualising the travel times from a point of origin using the directions API, a historical map stylised to look, well, more historical, a map visualizing the depth of bores in Victoria using the Circle class, and a v3 port of the popular TrendsMap.com.

All in all, it was an awesome week, and it was great to meet so many developers doing so many different things. If you're a developer in Australia and want to keep up-to-date with future Google developer events, subscribe to our mailing list. We look forward to seeing more of you in the future! And thank you Halans for your wonderful photos.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Google Australia