I received an email this morning from the Alexey Shelestenko (from Google) with a link to some photos from GDD 09 Moscow and this fantastic 2 minute video from the event:
This definitely is one event I’ll never forget. Lars is a superstar ;) Oh and here’s last year’s.
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 ;)
Here’s a little video that we’ve seen at Arvind’s and Sreeram’s presentation about speeding up the web at the Google Developer Day 2009 conference in Moscow. Inspiring isn’t it?
Arvind and Sreeram talked about a very nice plugin for Firefox (built upon Firebug) which is called Page Speed, developed and maintained by the Googlers. You may read more about the plugin on the official page at Google Code: Page Speed for Firefox/Firebug plus a bunch of cool tips and tricks right here: Let’s make the web faster. I used to run with one called YSlow by Yahoo, but the Googlers seem to have made a better job.
I ran the speed tests on my homepage and got quite a few sweet suggestions, mainly about combining and minifying my CSS and JavaScript files, distributing static content to different cookie-less domains and a couple more. Well combining and minifying CSS and JS would have been quite difficult in WordPress due to the series of plugins that use their own, if it weren’t of course for the W3 Total Cache plugin. In only a few minutes I managed to combine all javascript and stylesheets into single minified versions, which were recreated whenever a plugin was updated. After doing that, running the same test didn’t yield out that problem anymore. Distributing static content to different domains, well that’s one more issue that would have been solved by that brilliant cache plugin and its CDN features, but I guess I’ll have to wait for Amazon CloudFront compatibility.
One more thing I love about Page Speed is that not only they state the problem, but also provide the solution, or at least an easy guide to the solution. Now with a few warnings left, my Page Speed overall performance is okay. I hope to optimize that later this month for even faster access, and perhaps sign up with a PubSubHubbub service (Brett Slatkin had a fantastic presentation on that one at GDD too), and I can finally pronounce that correctly, Hubbub for short.
Okay it’s official, I AM going to be at Google Developer Day on the 10th of November in Moscow. I’ve got my business cards delivered yesterday, and yeah, they could have been a little bit better, but it’s alright. I posted them out on Twitter yesterday evening, if anybody’s missed it here’s the picture: twitpic.com/odnkt. Quite simple heh? Anyways, I haven’t yet decided which topics I want to go to and the ones I could miss, besides, some of them should be on YouTube the very next day, but I’m really looking forward to hearing about the Google Wave API, the Open and Social Web and of course HTML 5 and the Future of the Internet (at least it sounds funky).
Hope to meet a bunch of interesting folks there and have an overall great time! The official hashtag of the event is #gdd09ru.
Update: Google Developer day was fun, I had no idea it would be THAT awesome. You know what I mean if you’ve been following my tweets. Anyways, I’ll write up a new post with pictures and videos from the event later this week :)
Update: A detailed report has been filed here: Google Developer Day 2009 Moscow: Conclusion
