Google IO 2016 – Day 1

In my previous post(Google IO 2016 – A Day Before The Event) I shared my experience how I spent my first day in USA, now I will take you through my first day at Google IO for which I was there.

It was another exciting day for me in the USA, as today also there was something new and exciting, GoogleIO; for which I waited for a long time. It is also a kind of a dream come true for me to attend the GoogleIO in person.

My day started at 6am when I woke up, I was ready to go within half an hour. I was so excited that I was thinking to rush to the event venue very first at 7am, which was the time for badge pickup followed by breakfast at 8am followed by Keynote session at 10 am, but as I reached train station I lost my train and next train was after half an hour, but it was okay as I had already picked up my badge on yesterday and breakfast won’t take much time, I will definitely be there before Keynote. I spent my half an hour there on train station chatting with a local person, and then took my train to Mountain view followed by Google IO shuttle bus and I was there in 40 mins before the Keynote session. I took my breakfast there by having some doughnuts and coffee.

The venue was having a lot of crowd there with the attendance of 7000, I didn’t expect that. While moving around there I met with a guy Colin, engineer at Amazon and had some chat with him while waiting for entry to Keynote session, also we clicked some picks together with my Cannon EOS700 DSLR camera on tripod, purchased just before the trip. Finally entry to the amphitheatre started and we were allocated with seats in different section. As I entered there there were huge displays with running animations on them. After sometime a special music started there and I noticed there were a guy and a lady playing that music from a cabin mounted on big pillars, those cabins were actually for the cameramen. It was really nice music, they played it for 5-10 minutes.

There I met one more Indian, he clicked my pics there in amphitheatre but I didn’t have much interaction with him as session got started.

Finally Sunder Pichai, CEO Google came on stage to address the Google IO with a warm welcome. There was a huge excitement and enthusiasm in the crowd. 

In Keynote Sunder along with other Googlers introduced us with their plan and products for the future. It was quite exciting to hear directly from the horse’s mouth about the future of the technology. The hot cake topics they discussed there were

• Android N
• Android Development Tools
• Progressive Web Application
• Firebase
• Day Dream
• Machine learning
• Google Home
• Android Wear

Right now I am not digging these topics but will definitely share more on these topics, what I learnt from there in my future posts.

Session ended at 12pm and it was time for the lunch. I went out of the amphitheatre explore what veg options are there for me, but unfortunately didn’t find much. The lunch was available in boxes. I took one veg box from there with cold drink. I didn’t like that lunch but anyhow I finished that.

After that I was ready for the next session “What’s new in Android” at 1pm by Chet Hasse, Lead of Android UI toolkit team at Google; Dan Sandler, lead of Android System UI engineering team at Google; Romain Guy, engineer on Android graphics and UI technologies at Google. I had seen so many their online tutorials  to learn Android development, and it was really great to see all of them together on the stage and hear them directly. In that session they covered the following things

• Android N developer preview, Android latest version
• Android N: Performance, Productivity and Security
• VR Mode in Android
• Android Instant Apps: real apps, without the installation
• Android Wear 2.0: UI changes and standalone apps
• Android Studio 2.2 Preview: a new layout designer, constraint layout, and much more

Again, I am not going to dig these topics in detail, I will share my learning in future posts.

It was 10 minutes to 2pm and on my list next session was “Engineering cinematic experience in VR” but as I reached there there was a long queue for the session. I stood for some time and realised the place cannot accommodate these many people and I definitely won’t be able to make it. So I thought to go and attend some other session on some different topic, but everywhere there was huge crowd, so I decided not to go in any session, instead go in sandbox area to see what was exhibited there.

There in sandbox area I explored various projects and experiments and discussed with googlers regarding the same.

 

After roaming around in sandbox area for one and half hour, I was feeling tried as today it was quite sunny. So I decided to have a cold drink and sat under a tree to take some rest. I sat there for half an hour. Interestingly I was not alone there, everybody was feeling tried there, many were there under the tree taking rest.

Then again I was ready for the next session which was about to commence within 20 mins at 4pm. This time I decided to get into the queue early so that I can get a chance to get in.

I had chosen “Introducing Project Tango Area Learning” as my next topic presented by Wim Meeussen, Google. It was not every relevant topic but I wanted to explore new things as well. There in that session discussion was on following topics

• Augmented Reality
• Area learning
• Motion tracking
• Application based on Tango
• Tango devices

The session got ended in 35mins and then I headed to next session “Angular 2 and Progressive Web Apps” by Alex Rickabaugh, Google and Rob Wormald. As said earlier I was going to explore something new in this session. I had an idea of web application with AngularJS, I had worked on some samples of AngularJs but never did any project on that. But that was enough to understand the talks. Moreover Progressive Web Apps, one of the biggest hype there, was something new to me.

• User experience in Web Applications
• Angular 2
• Service Worker
• Angular Universal
  • Pre – rendering (On server)
  • Integration with Node.js, ASP.NET and others
  • Increased performance, SEO, Shareability
  • Caching
  • Routes
• Data binding
• Pre-compilation to reduce the size
• Offline compiler
• AngurlarFire(Firebase integration)
• Push Messaging
• ionic framework
• Web Components
• Angular CLI
• Web worker for multithreading

After this session in the quest of something new I headed to the next session “Make shinier, faster mobile games with Vulkan” presented by Hai Nguyen, Google. It was one of my interest area 3D graphics, I enjoyed the session and here are the topics I got to know about in the session

• Vulkan support of Cinder
• Moving from OpenGL to Vulkan
• Validation Layers(For debugging)
• Basics of Vulkan
• Porting within Vulkan

And this was my last session of the day, I was very tired and no energy was left. But how could I leave the event without experiencing the last thing of the day, concert. So I decided to stay there for half an hour for concert.

During the concert I made one more friend there Mardav, a Gujrati mota bhai; who works there with MailChimp. We roamed around for some time together chatting and eating there. But I didn’t eat much there as food was not of my taste.

But then one thing really good happened, I got my click of the day with Sunder Pichai, while he came there in concert for a short period of time with his family. I was just about to leave the venue I got a call from Kariem Hussain, the guy I met with in my flight form Amsterdam to Seattle. So I went to him and he introduced me with his brother and friends. We spent a some time together and all were amazing guys. We really had a great time together.

Then I took shuttle bus and reached Caltrain station and then to my hotel. And I got into bed so that I could be able to get up early in the morning for another exciting day at Google IO.

CONTINUED…Google IO 2016 – Day 2