Google I/O, as seen by a first-time goer
23.5.2018
What the I/O?
Author: Iiro Krankka (@koorankka), Mobile Developer at Codemate Ltd.
A couple of months ago, late in the evening, I got a new notification on my phone.
It seemed to be an email, and the title said “Action Requested by March 30″. The rest of the title got clipped off on my phone screen. Yet another one of these automated “prepare for GDPR emails” from Google Analytics or something, I thought. I’ll check it tomorrow.
The next morning came. I opened the email and started jumping out of joy.
I had been playing around with Flutter for one year. You might remember my previous article “Considering Flutter“, where we here at Codemate evaluated if Flutter was a viable option for building mobile apps for our clients. We concluded that Flutter is indeed an excellent piece of technology. And mind you, Flutter was still in alpha back then.
I’ve also written a blog about sharing my experiences using Flutter. It now has numerous articles and sample projects, one of which ended being a part of Flutter’s official documentation. I also released a couple of sample apps, all of which I open sourced to hopefully help other people learn.
I think it was the combination of introducing Flutter to Codemate and my personal efforts to share something with the community that got me the ticket. Google I/O was an event I had always wanted to go but didn’t even bother applying. I had the impression that it was way too hard to get in. Thanks, Flutter team!
The Trip
Having been to the US once before, I knew what to expect: the flights would take a long time. 15 hours to get there, and something similar to get back home. Well, not quite. Getting there was smooth, although took a long time. When getting back, I missed my connecting flight to Helsinki by 5 minutes, which resulted 10 hours more for me to get home and a return trip of 25 hours in total. Good times!
It was surprisingly exhausting to sit for 15+ hours. Who would’ve known! Once I got into my AirBnb, all I did was I went to sleep.
Sunday
This day was going to be all about two things: finding a gym membership and seeing the Google headquarters.
It turned out that gym memberships in Mountain View aren’t that cheap: $70-80 for one week. With that kind of money, depending on the gym, I could have a full month or even four months of training in Finland! I knew it was not going to be cheap, but this was something else. Nope, not doing that. I could manage one week of not going to the gym.
After vetting my gym options, I decided to do another kind of exercise instead. I walked a quite long distance to the Google headquarters and went to see the attractions.
The Android lawn statues were something I wanted to see for a long time. For the uninitiated, they are a set of sculptures representing the different Android version names which are based on some delicious desserts. They were initially placed near the building where the Android team worked in but then moved into the Google Visitor center.
I was lucky enough to be there early enough that there were virtually no other people around. It was the perfect time to grab some pictures. Especially in the later time, there was a vast amount of people and taking pictures would be harder.
The next obvious attraction was the Google Headquarters, or “Googleplex”, located within a mile or so from the Android lawn statues. It was a massive complex of offices, with a beautiful courtyard with a garden, the famous T-Rex skeleton and a couple private restaurants and cafes just for Google employees.
There were also multiple bicycles themed with Google’s brand colors, red, yellow, green and blue. Google provides something like one thousand bikes for its employees to ride. The funny thing about those bikes is that there are dedicated contractors, with vans, to pick up them around the campus. People can leave them parked wherever, and someone will come to pick them up.
Monday
“The best seating will be served on first-come, first-serve basis”,
it said on the Google I/O 2018 app. Challenge accepted. I was going to get the best seats no matter what. Because of my jetlag, this was an easy task. I woke up naturally at 3AM and went to line up for my badge at 4AM.
There was nobody else there, except for me and the security guards, who all thought I was crazy. And maybe they were right. The badge pickup would start at 7AM, and I was there 3 hours early. Having been waiting on a line for 12 hours for an AC/DC concert several years ago, this was going to be easy.
The first people after me came at 5AM. I got cinnamon rolls, Starbucks, and Twinkies and promised on Twitter that I would share those with the first people that came to keep me company. And I did. It turns out that it’s easy to make friends in the US. We exchanged numbers with couple people first in line and would then meet during the event and after that.
After standing on line for quite a while and getting my badge, I went to see the Stanford shopping center, which was quite cool. I bought myself a pair of sunglasses because my eyes were tired of seeing so much sun. I’m pretty sure I saw more sun during my week that I had seen during a year in Finland.
The Event
Just like on Sunday, I woke up at 3AM naturally due to jet lag. The gates and breakfast would open at 7AM, and from what I read out on the internet, the lines could get long couple hours before opening the venue. A lot of people would want to get the best seats for the keynote, right? So, I ended up being in the line 4AM yet again.
I met the same security guards who recognized me from last night. I also met my new friend I made in the line on Sunday, Talya, at 5AM. Turns out all this waiting on line this early was a bit redundant; me and Talya were the only ones in the line until the gates opened. Oh well, you could never know. We grabbed some bagels, muffins, and coffee for our breakfast and went to wait on our next line, which was the final line for the Shoreline Amphitheater.
While waiting on the previous lines was redundant, this last line proved to be worth it. One hour before the actual amphitheater opened, there were huge lines of people waiting to get the best seats for the keynote.
The Keynote
So, my new friend, Jesus, was a veteran when it comes to Google I/O:s. He had been there many times before. While my initial instinct was to go to the very first row, Jesus advised that the best seats were somewhere between the fifth and tenth rows. The reasoning for this was that the first rows were way too near and low regarding the stage, and it would be harder to see anything from there.
It turns out Jesus was right. We sat on the 6th row, and the seats were perfect. It was nothing short of magical to be there.
The Announcements
There were a lot of new announcements, but here are two that I personally found amazing.
One of the most exciting and impressive things on the keynote was something called Google Duplex. For those that missed the huge media attention, Duplex is Google’s AI technology that can have a spoken conversation which is indistinguishable from a real person.
The AI announcements in this year's #io18 are something out of this world! Google has been working on an AI that can have natural conversations with real people.
— Codemate (@CodemateLtd) May 8, 2018
Here's Google Assistant calling to a restaurant and making a table reservation on behalf of the user. pic.twitter.com/sNhEen6t91
In the video above, a user has said: “hey Google, book me a restaurant reservation for next Wednesday”. The user can merrily continue what they were previously doing. At the same time, Google Duplex makes an actual phone call to the restaurant. After the reservation is complete, an event will appear on the user’s calendar. Mind you; the above example is something complicated; the waitress didn’t quite understand the requirements.
Another quite exciting thing about the keynote was the new Google Maps. It uses augmented reality to show the user which way to go. For example, when navigating to a place, you can look through your camera, and there will be arrows on the street indicating which way to turn. They’re also experimenting with cute animals that show you the way; you can follow them to reach your destination.
The new @googlemaps will use augmented reality to show information about places nearby. They're also introducing cute little animals that guide you to the place you're navigating to. #io18 pic.twitter.com/B70DLDZWR0
— Codemate (@CodemateLtd) May 8, 2018
The Flutter Party
In the evening of the first Google I/O day, there was a private party, organized by the Flutter team. They invited a lot of the Flutter community members to thank everyone that helped. There was a lot of familiar faces, along with a lot of people from the Flutter team.
The event lasted 3 hours, and it felt like time went by way too fast. Everybody was happy about the recent success that Flutter had, and Matt Sullivan expressed his gratitude about the great community. Discussing with the Flutter team members was also quite fun; they were down to earth and delightful people to talk to.
In the end, although the Flutter party overlapped with the bouncy castles and sumo wrestling, I didn’t feel like I missed anything.
The Sandboxes
At the event area, there were a lot of sandboxes, or booths, that contained a lot of interesting live demos. There were way too many to go over all of them, but here’s a few I found to be interesting to me.
One thing that was surprising to me was that inKino, an app that I had recently made, was showcased in the Flutter booth all three days during Google I/O. For those that don’t know, inKino is an unofficial app I made for browsing Finnkino movies and showtimes. The inKino app made it to the front page of Hacker News and was trending on GitHub when I released it, and it being open source, a lot of people found it useful.
In the same tent, there was a fascinating thing called “Project Panoptes”. Abbreviation for Panoptic Astronomical Networked Observatories for a Public Transiting Exoplanets Survey, their purpose is to crowdsource finding transiting exoplanets. The Panoptes unit is a cheap enough for a regular hobby scientist to buy. This allows many units to be deployed across the globe. The unit contains two cameras and a smart tripod that knows how to track moving exoplanets and protect the cameras from bad weather.
Yet again in the same tent, there was also a rack of mobile devices. It was part of the Firebase Test Lab, a service that can be used for running instrumentation tests on multiple different devices and OS versions. Quite recently, they also added support for iOS devices as well.
.@GooglePlayDev console has deep integration with @Firebase Test Lab - all uploaded APKs get tested by default on numerous devices. They help catch severe bugs before making your Android apps available for public use.
— Codemate (@CodemateLtd) May 10, 2018
Here's one of the gazillion device racks running some tests. pic.twitter.com/Cmpayhtfhk
One cool fact is that every Android app in the Alpha or Beta lane in the Google Play Store is automatically tested for crashes using Firebase Test Lab. The way it works is that there’s a script that tries to map out the navigation hierarchy in the app, and then it tries to navigate to different screens. These automatic tests are run in addition to your existing tests that you’ve written.
The Food
On every breakfast, there was bagels, muffins, and coffee, along with various desserts. It might not seem that much, but those simple bagels and muffins kept my hunger away long enough until it was lunchtime.
The lunch boxes were the highlight of the day. There were several options to choose from, and the followed the same pattern; there was always a meaty (ham, salami, etc.), not-so-meaty (turkey/chicken/fish), and vegetarian options to choose from. The main thing would be either a sandwich or a salad, and the lunch box also contained a cookie, a small bag of chips and an apple.
On dinners, which were served on the first two days, there were various warm plates, such as pulled pork, beef, sliders and other similar things to choose from. And of course, beer.
Last words
Like I said, this was my first Google I/O. And I loved it! A lot of people said that there had been organizing issues regarding food and water on the previous ones, but felt like in this year’s I/O, everything was sorted out.
Surprisingly enough, I only attended seven talks or so. My reasoning for this was that I could always watch the talks later on YouTube. There were so many people to connect with that I wouldn’t have met otherwise, so I felt like this was a right decision.
On the last day, it was sad that it all had ended. I made a lot of new friends during my stay, living both in Europe and the US – hopefully I’ll get to meet them again!
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