Moments Inside Google I/O 2017

Google I/O 2017 is the highly-anticipated and much-improved follow-on edition of Google I/O 2016.  It's evident throughout all aspects of the conference that they took feedback and lessons learned from last year's maiden foray into the Shoreline Amphitheater to make for a much more awesome experience.  Now, I sit here writing this to you from inside the Amphitheatre itself, comfortable in just a thin long-sleeve shirt and jeans, no wind at all (unlike last year), awash in sound from the LCD Soundsystem.  However, I almost didn't write you this story.


A Nearly Missed Opportunity


The registration window for I/O 17 came upon us.  Stacy reminded me it was time for this, but I balked at the price -- up $150 from last year!  Nevertheless, I still planned to register... until I didn't.  I hadn't realized I forgot until a day after registration closed.  My heart fell through the floor, and Stacy rolled her eyes... Oh Stevo... Oh well... I thought all hope was lost until she told me of an opportunity to try again for another shot at a ticket through the Women Techmakers raffle.  I applied for the raffle dutifully -- it's never fun to fill out the long Google I/O registration form though -- but knowing it was my only shot, it needed to get done.  Fast forward just a couple days later, April 18, tax day, and on a day when I was about to spend about $12,000 between car repairs and the tax bill... well, I got debited another $750 when I won the raffle.  Now that actually felt good, because it was $300 off the regular ticket price anyway!


What to Do In the Bay Area


Prior to the event, besides bumming around San Francisco while Stacy participated in various Women Techmakers events (and all the touristy stuff that entails) (except for how I actually wandered through the Tenderloin district once accidentally and a couple times on purpose), I spent a significant part of "Day Zero" wandering around the Sunnyvale area hitting up old-time electronics stores still leftover from the days when hardware companies ruled Silicon Valley and software was something you crammed onto a tiny PROM chip if you were lucky.  (But more on that possibly next week... I have to make sure I'm clear to post some of those pictures, plus Google I/O is timely this week!)

Anyway, there are some "Zero-Day" parties sponsored by companies participating in Google I/O.  I scored invitations and tickets to the Netflix party and, for the second year, the Intel IoT party.  The night started with the Netflix party for me, which I arrived at after dropping off my haul from all the old electronics and computer stores.  It was at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, very close to the Googleplex.  It is a cool museum, but unfortunately most of the people there seemed to already be in their little cliques and didn't seem too terribly interested in talking to a guy with a cool homemade LED badge.  It's kind of sad how insular a lot of tech folks can be.

After that party, I headed a bit northwest to the Intel Day Zero IoT party, where like last year, they had a variety of demos and you could earn tokens for swag by listening to these demos, and even more tokens by talking shop with the Intel representatives at the booths.  This one is set up more like a dance party with loud music and flowing beer, and the people at the Intel party seem to be more in a social mood; rather than just standing around on their phones talking amongst their own coworkers, people are flowing around between so many demos that there are plenty of opportunities to meet cool people.  Now, the Netflix party had demos too, but maybe there were not enough or they weren't so compelling?

In any event, even from the experience of getting tickets for I/O on Tuesday before the event, I could already tell things were going to be better.  They had actual organization for the Uber & Lyft rides, and so I knew they had taken into account at least some of the lessons from last year.  In fact, here are my takes on how it's better:

  • Break-out sessions are overall in much larger rooms.  Last year, only one or two of the rooms were really big; the rest of the sessions were in small geodesic domes.  This year, those geodesic domes are reserved for demo rooms (which were mostly outdoors last year, with the exception of a few like Firebase and BigQuery), and all the conference rooms are large.  In fact, I think a couple rooms are even bigger than the biggest rooms last year.
  • The food actually tastes like it has flavor.  The downside to this is I was really looking forward to getting a "food cleansing" like I got last year, but with the improvement in quality, it doesn't feel like that's going to happen.
  • We're back to getting a lot of nice swag.
  • The transportation situation has improved a bunch, as they had well-planned routes for Uber and Lyft drivers to take.
  • There seems to be quite a bit more seating around the venue.
From what I can tell, the cost of these improvements seems to be that some of the demo areas seem to be a bit more squishy than they were last year.  However, previously the Office Hours and Design Reviews took place in half-open tents; this year, they are also in enclosed rooms.  There are still a bunch of demos to be seen; plenty on Firebase of course, but also Android Auto, Google Assistant, Android Things, and all the ways in which these platforms can be connected.

The key takeaway I have from all this talk though, including everything from the keynote to the breakout sessions, is:

Don't bother specializing in any one particular area.

As a developer who has always had a wide variety of interests in the field and written in a number of programming languages, I've seen where Google is trying to make things previously unfathomably difficult and basically impractical for any corporation to want to invest in (and for academics to only dream of) to be made possible.  At first, we saw Sundar Pichai talk about Google training machine learning models to come up with...other machine learning models.  Computers will now be testing in parallel what it takes data scientists months or possibly years to come up with on their own in series and only after lots of tedious model building and testing.  The other big announcement is that Kotlin is now being added to Android Studio in addition to Java.  And while Google promises that Java will still be a first-class language and supported heavily, it will soon become evident that those who know Kotlin will become much more efficient and effective at implementing Android code than those still thrashing through standard Java code.

Other notable events:


* Ellie Powers, Product Manager for Google Play developers, introduces Google Baby at Speechless.  As a result of my live-tweeting all of Speechless, she now follows me on Twitter.  Cool!

* Stacy was the headliner of a Women Android Developers panel in San Francisco Thursday night.

* "Make Your Android O-Face" will be the next big social media trend.

* And there's still a whole 'nother day of the conference left, so we'll see what transpires!

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