GDG Douglas DevFest 2019

GDG Douglas, Isle of Man

Fri 22 & Sat 23 November 2019

Bringing technical speakers from Google to the Island for the first time, you are warmly welcomed to join our inaugural DevFest!

Our 'Developer Festival' is a technical conference aimed at students, professionals or simply curious techies of all ages, levels and specialties.

Speakers

Marc Cohen

GCP Developer Advocate

Wesley Chun

Google Developer Advocate

John Lenton

Canonical

Software Engineer

Carla Brown

Game Doctor

Director

Kavita Kappor

Technologist

Chris Hogben

Systems Developer

Filip Babić

Google Developer Expert

James Littlejohn

healthscience.network LAB Peer

coder & hacker

Arthur Owenson

Isle of Man Code Club

Student developer

Luka Warren

Isle of Man Code Club

Student developer

Sid Shakthivel

Isle of Man Code Club

Student developer

Hosted by

John Middleton

Darren Barklie

Sessions

Friday 22 November

11:00 - 11:45

Registration and networking

Arrive early, register and enjoy a coffee and a chance to talk with the speakers and your fellow delegates.

11:45 - 12:00

Welcome

John Middleton, GDG Douglas

Darren Barklie, GDG Douglas

Welcome and introduction

12:00 - 12:50

Build with ALL of Google Cloud

Wesley Chun, Google Developer Advocate

You may be familiar with G Suite, Google's productivity tools: Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. You may also know Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as a collection of online services providing compute, storage, networking, security, machine learning, and data analysis tools. While they appear to be disparate product groups, what you may NOT know is that behind each of the G Suite apps is a developer API, and that both platforms can be used together to build powerful solutions. It really isn't about the tech is much as what problems you can solve with it. This session exposes popular APIs from both GCP & G Suite as well as highlights several novel solutions that were built as inspiration into what's possible, showing developers the potential of building with ALL of Google Cloud.

13:00 - 13:50

Testing in Go

John Lenton, Canonical

An introductory-level tour of some testing approaches in Go, covering white and black-box unit testing, and benchmarking, using the standard library.

14:00 - 14:50

AI Adaptive learning: The case for creativity

Kavita Kapoor, Technologist

Personalised online systems are the next big breakthrough in education. Having been successful in advertising and other sectors investors across the USA and China seem to be lining up to invest in adaptive learning platforms. Kavita in conjunction with the WLinAI - Education working group, has been looking at how this sector has been evolving across the world. Interested in how AI might foster creativity and human interaction while still helping human students learn, Kavita will outline how she thinks an ethical AI approach could be built.

15:00 - 15:50

Spread, an integration testing driver

John Lenton, Canonical

In developing snapd we needed to test against multiple distributions and architectures, and were not happy with the tools available to us so we built our own. It's called spread, and it's awesome.

16:00 - 16:50

Leveling the playing field - Practical data science for everyone

Marc Cohen, Google Cloud Platform

No one has ever had more data right at their fingertips than you do right now. At the same time, the tools to gather, analyze, visualize, and make predictions about this data are more powerful and easier to use than ever before. This talk features examples anyone can do to extract insight from datasets in the cloud. Demos will include BigQuery, Connected Sheets, AutoML Tables, and other products.

17:00 - 17:50

Kotlin 101: The language of Android

Filip Babić, Google Developer Expert

Even though it's been in development and use for nearly a decade, a lot of people still haven't used or experienced all that Kotlin offers. On the throne as the language-to-use in Android development, in this session we'll see why that is, and what Kotlin offers for Android and other platforms, that other programming languages may not.

17:50 - 18:00

Closing comments

John Middleton, GDG Douglas

Darren Barklie, GDG Douglas

Closing comments

Saturday 23 November

08:00 - 09:00

Registration and networking

Arrive early, register and enjoy a coffee and a chance to talk with the speakers and your fellow delegates.

09:00 - 09:15

Welcome

John Middleton, GDG Douglas

Darren Barklie, GDG Douglas

Welcome and introduction

09:15 - 11:10

Workshop: Learn how to build a state of the art Machine Learning model

Marc Cohen, Google Cloud Platform

Some background on Machine Learning, how it works, how it's being used at Google, and how you can use it now to solve real world problems. Then we'll work on a lab exercise (so bring your laptop!). Together we'll see how to train and execute a deep neural network to recognize handwritten digits at better 99% accuracy.

11:10 - 11:40

Coffee break

11:40 - 12:30

Introduction to Android development

Filip Babić, Google Developer Expert

With a high market coverage and a low entry cost for new developers, Android has held its place as one of the most tempting technologies to get into, if you're an up-and-coming application developer. In this session, we'll see which base components make up Android, how they work and what they offer. You'll also see which challenges Android development might set in your way, and how to overcome them.

12:30 - 13:30

Lunch break

13:30 - 13:40

Unicode, the terminal, and you

John Lenton, Canonical

A mixed bag of introductory things about writing Unicode to the terminal you should probably know.

13:45 - 13:55

Creating a beacon of light in your, small, corner of the world

Filip Babić, Google Developer Expert

The world is filled with possibilities. However, not everyone is able to grasp them. The best way to build yourself is to put your heart and soul into the education of others. Even the smallest idea can change the lives of many, when it’s selfless, so let’s build up a community together.

14:00 - 14:50

Workshop: Android App Inventor introduction

Chris Hogben, Systems Developer

A hands on introduction to App Inventor - MIT's Android programming language that greatly simplifies development. At the end of the session, all delegates should have an app they wrote working on their phone.

15:00 - 15:50

Plug and play AI. Can we ‘learn’ AI with minimal coding?

Kavita Kapoor, Technologist

Come prepared to laugh at our collective understanding of AI. We shall run through a series of exercises exploring what we mean by intelligence, running some Turing tests on humans and more.

16:00 - 16:30

Games for science and healthcare

Carla Brown, Director, Game Doctor

Over the last decade, games have been used increasingly to educate the public on science and healthcare. U.K. game studio, Game Doctor is dedicated to this industry and works with scientists and healthcare professionals to develop games on complex topics such as antimicrobial resistance, obesity, food safety and new therapies. Game Doctor founder Dr Carla Brown will discuss the current evidence for gaming and education and will outline future trends and opportunities in this emerging market.

16:40 - 17:30

DIY HealthScience

James Littlejohn

healthscience.network LAB Peer, coder & hacker

The opportunities and challenges of the 21 century will require new ways of harnessing and organising collective intelligence. A key trend in recent years has been the growth in Do-it-yourself or citizen science projects. Unlike their peers in academia, corporate or open science they have to bootstrap and build their own tools and analysis. This workshop will demonstrate and put forward the use of peer to peer technology infrastructure to bring new capabilities to the DIY scientist.

17:40 - 17:50

Modern web apps: building housedata.im

Arthur Owenson - Isle of Man Code Club

Luka Warren - Isle of Man Code Club

Sid Shakthivel - Isle of Man Code Club

A brief overview of our website, housedata.im, and how the experience helped us to learn about modern web technologies and create a fantastic end product. We’ll go through some of the architectural and design decisions we made, and what we learnt along the way.