Google Developer Day 2009 Moscow – Conclusion

Well I guess it’s time to give you a detailed update on the event of the year – Google Developer Day 2009 Moscow (Google I/O, #gdd09ru on Twitter). It was held on November 10th, with over 1,500 visitors and a few guys from Google! Here’s a little video (Chrome Experiments and the Google I/O song with the lyrics) that’s been playing around on the big screens during the conference.

Out of the many topics at GDD 2009 I had the chance to listen to HTML 5, OpenSocial, Speeding up the Web, Google Web Toolkit, Google AppEngine, Google Android and PubSubHubbub. The most interesting was of course OpenSocial by Chris Chabot – Developer Advocate at Google. I also had a little chat with Chris during one of the breaks and he seemed like a very nice guy to me. I found out some interesting stuff about OpenSocial and started writing some code already! Too bad though that Facebook aren’t yet supporting OpenSocial, guess they’re too fond of their own platform and API. Well, that’s Facebook ;)

One more interesting topic was Speeding up the Web, but I wrote about that earlier: Every Millisecond Counts: Page Speed for Firebug.

HTML 5 and PubSubHubbub were just introductory presentations of what’s going on with the web and why real-time matters. Basically all that stuff is available on the net for quite a long time now, though I didn’t quite understand why the RSS Cloud by Dave Winer doesn’t seem to have a future.

The Google Web Toolkit and AppEngine lectures were a bit more techy than the rest. We saw lots of code on the screen which showed some nice methods for testing web applications, the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) design pattern, and the keynote featured a little demonstration about how easy it is to write and deploy Java applications using the Google Web Toolkit and AppEngine plugins in Eclipse.

Other celebrities at Google Develoepr Day were Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon – the creators of Google Wave from Google Sydney. By the way a friend of mine Alex managed to get a cool photo with Lars, and I managed to get one (not so cool, blame the photographer) with Chris. Here are a few photos from the event:

I’d also like to give a huge shoutout to Alexey Shelestenko from Google Russia. There were way too many people dying to get to the event, but Alexey was the one who made sure I could come. Thank you so much Alexey! And I guess that’s it, waiting for Google Developer Day 2010 ;)

About the author

Konstantin Kovshenin

WordPress Core Contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in Moscow. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

4 comments

  • Wow this looks such a great time! You must have had a total blast there. Did you make some good contacts that you will keep in touch with and what was the International representation, was there a good mix from other countries? Curious – what the heck is that food in the picture on the table in front of you?

    • Blast, totally! Yeah I made some contacts, most of them local though, there weren't much peeps from other countries. In fact, the only peeps from other countries (at least the ones I noticed) were the Google staff ;) Got in touch with some young Ruby & Rails developers, co-thinkers php and javascript junkies, some C++ and Java madness too. The food in front of me is just some sweet stuff, I didn't eat it anyway, we left that as soon as Chris left the table and completely forgot about it. Too excited I guess ;)