Google Developer Day Moscow 2010

It’s been a good Friday last week, although I was a little bit late for the show. The event was held in Crocus City Hall in Moscow, which is quite wicked unless you drive there by car. Google Developer Day Moscow 2010, we all waited so long for it (one whole year actually) and it turned out to be… fascinating, as usual!

Starting early morning we got some coffee (which I was late for) and took our place in the main hall for the keynote by Eric Tholome and Gene Sokolov and a few other speakers who introduced their sections: Chrome & HTML5 was amazing, 2d and 3d graphics, filesystem API and hardware access, thus – speech recognition, device orientation and more. Chrome Web Store is coming soon (developer preview available). Cloud Computing with the new AppEngine for Business, plus a short introduction to Spring Roo. The Android introduction was quite boring. Other sections (Monetization and Social Web) didn’t get their five minutes during the keynote.

After that we all went out to have some fun, drank coke, played MindBall, PS3 and air hockey. This part turned out to be much more exciting than last year ;) and then came the presentations. I’ll list below the ones I’ve been at, others were promised to be listed on Google Code Blog.

Google Web Toolkit

Fred Sauer (@fredsa) gave us yet another short intro to GWT, mentioned again that the Google AdWords interface is built completely using their toolkit which is wonderful. Yeah, we heard that last year, did anything change? Well yeah, Fred spoke a little bit more about Spring Roo and then off to Eclipse. We’ve seen Eclipse last year too, but it seems that they made some improvements on the Google Plugin for Eclipse and introduced Speed Tracer which is quite exciting.

We went once more through the features of GWT, a brief GWT 2.1 introduction and yet another MVP presentation (for the ones that missed it last year).

This whole presentation made me install Eclipse immediately. I downloaded and installed the Google Plugin with AppEngine and GWT enabled, I switched my workspace to PyDev, created a new Google AppEngine Hello-World project, hit Deploy to AppEngine and bang! It told me that Eclipse cannot deploy my project to AppEngine since it’s not an AppEngine project. What? Goodbye Eclipse, see you next year! ;)

AppEngine for Business

I miseed the first “What’s new in AppEngine” topic by Fred, but Patrick Chanezon (@chanezon) outlined some of the exciting bits in his topic. Patrick introduced us to AppEngine for Business: SLA, Support, Hosted SQL, Custom Domain SSL and Enterprise Admin Console (sounds awesome, doesn’t it) – but yet again, I’m not that keen on trying it, especially with the feeling that they’ve done everything right, but only for Java, while Python is lacking behind. I’m okay with the current console and limitations, so thank you Google ;)

Once again, we’ve been told about Eclipse, the Google Plugin for Eclipse and how easy it is to deploy an application to AppEngine (Java, *sigh*). Patrick then gave us a short intro to the Google Apps Marketplace and took questions, which were mostly about feeds, comissions, etc.

VC Investment for Your Company

This was quite interesting with Ilya Ponomarev (@iponomarev) and Don Dodge (@dondodge) on stage. They discussed doing business in Russia, startups, business incubators and Skolkovo Innovation Center. Surprisingly Ilya mentioned Timothy Post (@timothypost) and Runet Labs as the ones launching Techstars in Russia.

Ilya and Don took many questions, most of which were either boring, or from journalists ;) At the end of the session, Don disappeared and Ilya gathered a group outside in the main hall and spent another hour answering questions (some of which were silly again). But yeah, it’s good to hear that stuff like this is at least being discussed. A good quote from Don about looking for VC investment in your startup:

One person can have a delusion. But if three people are crazy, okay, we’ll give you the money!

Don Dodge at Google Developer Day Moscow 2010

Well, that’s quite it! At the end of all the sessions we got Google Developer Day and Google Chrome t-shirts, beer and wine, again, this seems to be a tradition. I’ve gathered a Twitter list of people I met, heard about and seen at Google Developer Day, you can find it right over here: @kovshenin/gddru – feel free to poke me if there’s somebody I forgot to add to that list.

Anyways, it’s been a great day, hope to be there next year!