My first developer meet up: Google Devfest



Nov 4th, 2017

   10AM:
       We first started off the day with a keynote speaker talking about being a developer for 21 years. Seeing him in his shoes and learning to adapt to different technologies developing over the years, must be pretty hard to get used to, he explained that the process can get difficult to get used to but with a bit of trusting the process, he got used to it. As of now I am prepping up for my first code lab learning about the Ionic framework, which is the equivalent to react native for angular. I was able to meet with two very well experienced developers and it is surprised to my knowledge that there are different types of platforms that developers stand on for development. There was one developer I have met and he told me that he developed on .Net, which is really interesting. Also  met another presenter who is a developer for kotlin, who came all the way from France!. So as of now, it is a great start and I'll keep an up to date time update on what I do next.

11AM:
    "Ever year cpu will grow exponential which falls under moore's law".  This was the lecturer's explanation of processing and computation. The presentation was on Datasets with Tensorflow, and usually tensorflow would act upon the cpu when dealing with neural networks. This one was a little different. The presenter was able to acquire the datasets api to create a neural network for his gpu, along with the tensorflow framework. It was a a real interesting concept, and a lot of things that he rendered around just to settle the datasets with his gpu.

1PM-3PM:
  Around this hour, we got to formulate into our hackathon groups. Since I was a solo going into this one, I was randomly paired with other developers. I can literally see why Lambda School pushed us towards paired programming, it is sooo much more helpful and it feels like a team effort once you get things completed. This was pretty much my moment going into the field since these people already have their footstep in the doorway. At first it was pretty much a hassle deciding what we wanted to do in the first place, it took us about 30 min just to get our idea rolling, and we didn't have much time. The concept of the hackathon was to make a skill for the google assistant which is basically the equivalent of Amazons alexa. Our idea came from a joke that the keynote speaker told us. His exact words were "heres an idea you guys can do for the hackathon, and I don't mind letting you guys use it, but as a halloween thing, wouldn't it be cool to have google randomly scare you?" . We took that into consideration of what we wanted to do and mixed things up a bit, as a Christmas themed action, we decided to make it sing Christmas carols instead of scaring. Since Christmas was right around the corner, we did this idea, thus commenced our building time.

  Completing the build, we literally finished right on time making our action. It was my first time making an action for google as well. Surprised to my knowledge a lot of the actions is built upon javascript basically the same as the Alexa skills. Basically what we did was we called the cloud function from the npm package, and have it initialized by the request response pair, thus  we passed our action towards the api.ai object so we can have a fully working Google Assistant skill.
We finished everything, pushed our changes, and we were set!. We turned ours in and it took them about an hour to fully review everyones project.

4PM:

  They finally came to the end of the results and they started to announced the winners of the hackathon. Sadly enough we didn't win the hackathon, but although we didn't win, we still ended up pretty close. Out of 15 groups in the hackathon, we managed to get 4th place which was really close!. I was surprised to my knowledge that we came that close, and the keynote speaker who gave the joke that sparked our idea, gave us props and told us that we were really close. My partners and I exchanged contacts and admired how great we did.

5PM: Closing remarks

   Towards the last presentation of the google devfest, we all had a great time, met new people and exchanged contacts. The best part about my community meetup like this was getting to see all different types of people who loved doing the same thing I loved doing and for that I personally got invited by one of my partners from the hackathon to join the google developer meetups in LA they have every week. He himself worked at google for 5 years and told me that I have potential and looked very promising. We then had a final presentation before heading out.


So the bigger questions are, what did I take from this? and what did I learn just from going. Well first and foremost, after all the things I had from the developer festival, I am sure glad I went. I went thinking that this was going to be an intimidating event for me, but the truth is, everyone in that meetup came for the same reason, to learn!. Especially for the people that have been working in the industry for so long and they still show up for that same reason, to learn. The Key factor of me going to this event was to get comfortable for what I am about to embark on once I finish lambda school, I wanted to get familiar with the culture and the community. Sure Lambda does provide that and I thank Austen and Ben for providing me that stepping stool, but to be fair, the things that are being thrown at me is pixie dust, and it is up to me whether I want to fly or not. Thats why I going to be involved with these events a lot more now just to get comfortable and that I can be more than prepared. I love Lambda school and everything that they are providing me, but I feel like if I don't get out there and not get involved, I probably would have a hard time adapting. So I have decided to start going to these google developer meetups so that I can feel more than comfortable once I'm done. Not only am I getting involved with lambda school, but I am also getting involved with the software developer community as a whole by putting myself out there. And that is what I learned from all this!

-Eric Blancas




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