Experiencing GDG Sydney x Google I/O Extended: A Deep Dive into Innovation

Last Saturday, on a sun-soaked morning, my colleagues and I attended the GDG Sydney x Google I/O Extended event. We met a diverse group of people from various fields and regions, enjoying the chance to network and reconnect with familiar organisers. For those who couldn’t make it to the event, we’ve penned this article to share our experiences and key takeaways. Whether you’re a developer, IT professional, or simply curious about the latest tech trends, read on to discover what GDG Sydney x Google I/O Extended was all about and what exciting innovations were unveiled.

GDG & Google I/O Explained

Google Developer Groups (GDG) are local meetups for tech enthusiasts who love Google’s tools and technologies. Imagine a bunch of developers getting together to geek out over the latest in Android, web development, cloud, and more. From bustling cities to small towns, GDGs create friendly spaces for developers of all levels to learn, share, and connect. GDG Sydney is part of this global network, offering a blend of community spirit, cutting-edge tech insights, and practices.

Google I/O, Google’s big annual show-and-tell for developers. It’s where Google drops all the cool new stuff they’ve been working on — think major updates to Android, exciting new features for Google’s AI, and a sneak peek at what’s coming next in their world. The flagship event is typically held in San Francisco, but not everyone can attend in person. This is where Google I/O Extended comes in, bringing the excitement and announcements of Google I/O to local communities worldwide.

GDG Sydney x Google I/O Extended provided us with a chance to experience these innovations right here in Sydney, blending the global tech buzz with our local community vibe.

Sure, we tried to recreate this feeling during our remote days with employee monitoring software but we always had this nagging doubt that our developers had hacked their way around it.

Event Highlights and Key Takeaways

Our day started with an aspirational introduction from Kristine Song on how to build your career — the key points being to learn, connect, and inspire by getting involved with your dev community. Fitting as half our audience were young grads just entering the professional world.

App developers will be happy to hear our first few talks were very focused on Flutter, Dart, and all things frontend/backend development. We saw some engaging live demos from Suesi Tran on integrating Gemini 1.5 into apps, really showcasing the latest abilities of voice-to-text. Exciting to see how developer-friendly the interface is between app requests and Gemini processing. Exciting takeaway: Gemini’s latest largest context window of 2 million tokens translates to the ability to handle two hours of video input.

Following this was Luke Moody on Backend as a Service with Dart, another technical exploration into the various latest frameworks and features. I’m especially excited to give Serverpod a go.

After lunch, we had a talk from Barsha Karki on career and leadership in cybersec. Main quote courtesy of Obama: “Just learn how to get stuff done”. She drew parallels between networks and networking, the importance of technical developers working alongside their sales teams in the realm of pre-sales, and once again brought up the value of community. In summary, your career should include a coach, mentor, and sponsor: A coach is someone who talks to you, someone with expertise who gives you development feedback. A mentor is someone who talks with you, giving you social support and career advice. A sponsor is someone who talks about you, someone who will cheer you on when you’re not in the room, providing advocacy. Recommended book: “The Go Giver”. P.S. There was Karaoke to energise everyone after the lunch!

This was followed by jumping back into tech with Priyanka Gyaurali showcasing Google’s VertexAI and the Model garden, giving us a live demo of model deployment and fine-tuning, the differences between large and small language models with advice for which to use for different situations.

Continuing on this theme was Oscar Wahlitnez showcasing Gemma, the lightweight and open source sister to Gemini. It was exciting to see such passion for open source projects and the volume of community engagement with moving this tech forward, especially given the mission statement of accountability, responsibility, and AI for all. In an exciting demo he turned off his wifi, locally made the requisite gemma.cpp, and held the audience captive as this large language model generated text entirely on the MacBook. We’re always a fan of live demos!

The day wrapped up with a panel discussion around the future of AI, wrapped up with some questions from the audience. These ranged from “will AI take our jobs?” to the more pragmatic “How do you deal with the hype from people thinking AI will take our jobs?”. All in all, a fitting summary to an event highly dominated by the latest GenAI industry trends, although the data engineers among us still had time to discuss what’ll be included in version 3 of Cloud Composer.

Conclusion

In conclusion, GDG Sydney x Google I/O Extended was an amazing blend of global tech innovation and local community vibes. The event was packed with everything from insightful career advice by industry leaders to jaw-dropping demos of Flutter, Dart, and the latest in AI. It gave us all a peek into the future of technology.

People walked away not just inspired but also armed with new knowledge and connections. It truly captured the essence of GDG meetups — learning, sharing, and growing together. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, the day was a shining example of the power of community and the endless possibilities of tech innovation.

All in all, it was a fantastic day that left everyone buzzing with new ideas and excitement for what’s next in the world of tech.