Join the League of Extraordinary #H4ckers at SXSW!

Heading to Austin, TX for South by Southwest (SXSW) this week? Good — so are we. And we’re planning what I hope will be a an event for the ages!

The festivities start at 1pm on March 13 with the opening of The League of Extraordinary Hackers followed by a very special SuperHappyDevHouse at 7pm at the Speakeasy on 412 Congress Ave in Austin.

Business by day, hacking by night

From 1pm to 6pm, we’ll be hosting a series of 15-minute rapid-fire API briefings focused on Google’s latest developer offerings including: Android, Chrome, HTML5, Blogger, Google TV, Google Maps, App Engine, YouTube, Web Fonts, Cellbots, and Fusion Tables. Immediately following each talk, the speakers will be holding court during office hours in Speakeasy’s open air rooftop lounge.

At the same time, we’ll be demoing Google TV and the YouTube Leanback experience in the Leanback Lounge on the second floor. And if you’re just looking for a place to chill, meet other Google developers, or grab free WiFi and juice for your devices, we’ve got you covered in that department as well.

Yes, this is one of our drink cards.

At 7pm, we’ll welcome the SuperHappyDevHouse community for a night of hacking, lightning talks, a LEGO^® MINDSTORMS^® sumobot competition (!), steampunkery, and Google TV and Xbox 360^® Kinect^™ tomfoolery. And if a soundtrack co-curated on Rdio weren’t enough to make your booty move, then come get loosened up with League-inspired elixirs concocted by Google’s own mixologist, Daniel “Gin not Vodka” Nadasi!

This event promises to be one-of-a-kind and a rare respite from the pure partying events at SXSW. Of course it wouldn’t be possible with a great cast of sponsors including Google, Windows Live, The LEGO Group, NPR, Sencha, Red Bull Creation, Twilio, and Rdio.

Get on the list and invite your friends

Since we’re managing attendees separately, the most important links you need are the ones that get you in (and get you free drinks!):

1. RSVP for The League of Extraordinary Hackers
   
2. RSVP for SHDH@SXSW
   

You can also find these events elsewhere:

1. The League of Extraordinary Hackers is on Facebook, Plancast, and Lanyrd
   
2. SHDH@SXSW is on Facebook, Plancast, and Lanyrd
   

Not attending SXSW? No worries — follow along with the #h4ckers hashtag on March 13.

Hope to see you there!

P.S. Make sure to follow @googlesxsw for updates during the show!

— Chris Messina, Developer Relations

Introducing the Advocate Bios and Developer Events pages

We know that developers are always interested in learning about new APIs and best practices for existing ones. And, one of the best ways to learn is face to face interaction with an expert in the subject.

Your friendly neighborhood Google Developer Relations team members work everyday with the APIs you care about. We host, as well as attend, a number of events around the world to help as many developers as possible throughout the year. However, it hasn’t been easy for interested developers to find relevant events close to them.

We also realized that while many developers have met at least a couple of our Developer Advocates, it’s hard to tie an Advocate to their API expertise.

Enter the Advocate Bios and Developer Events pages.

The Advocates Bios page provides names, pictures and short descriptions of Developer Relations team members. You can filter them by what they work on and/or where they’re based out of.

The Developer Events page is a mashup of the Calendar and Maps APIs, running on an App Engine backend. Want to know about upcoming Android events in Prague? Or whether Patrick Chanezon is speaking at the GDD in Munich on Nov 9th? (He is!) You can do all of that and more with the Developer Events page.

Both the bios and the events pages are conveniently linked under the Developer Resources section on the Google Code home page.

We hope to see you at the events!

By Peng Ying and Swapneel Kshetramade, Google Developer Relations Team

Google App Engine Hack-a-thon coming to your coast!

By Amanda Surya, Google Developer Programs

In May, we'll be holding two Google App Engine Hack-a-thons at Google's offices. The first one will be in New York, May 7th, from 10am - 6pm, and the second one in San Francisco, May 16th, 10am - 10pm. This is a great opportunity to get started on Google App Engine. You can code along with us in building an app from start to finish or you can bring your existing apps and get some help and guidance from Google engineers.

Check out the full details of these events and RSVP for either the New York Hack-a-thon or the San Francisco Hack-a-thon. Or both, if you have the frequent flier miles to spare.

Google Developer Days 2008: expanding to thirteen locations

By Elizabeth Yin, Google Developer Programs

Google Developer Days 2008, a set of one-day developer events, are back and will take place in locations around the world. We've designed these events for developers with strong coding backgrounds, so that we can discuss our APIs, developer tools and applications.

We'll host Google Developer Day in these locations:

• Yokohama, Japan (June 10)
• Beijing, China (June 12)
• Taipei, Taiwan (June 14)
• Sydney, Australia (June 18)
• Mexico City, Mexico (June 23)
• Sao Paulo, Brazil (June 27)
• London, UK (Sept 16)
• Paris, France (Sept 18)
• Munich, Germany (Sept 23)
• Madrid, Spain (Sept 25)
• Milan, Italy (Oct 21)
• Prague, Czech (Oct 23)
• Moscow, Russia (Oct 28)

If you're based in the US, we encourage you to come to Google I/O, on May 28-29 in San Francisco.

At Google Developer Day, our engineers will share their inside knowledge on our developer tools and APIs, including Android, OpenSocial, and AppEngine. In many locations we'll do deep dives into code and conduct hands-on codelabs.

We've posted detailed information for our early dates and will be adding more information for other locations soon. If you're a developer, we encourage you to sign-up for a Google Developer Day at a nearby location. Hope to see you there.

Update: Corrected the September 23rd event location from Hamburg, Germany to Munich, Germany.

Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group to host maps meeting

By guest author, Michael "Van" Riper, Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group

Ever wondered how to create maps like this Primary Election Results Map, created by Michael Geary? If so, please join us in at the Googleplex (Bldg 43, main campus, room Tunis) on the evening of April 2nd. Michael will be on hand to show you how. This gathering is being co-hosted by the Google GEO Developer Series and the recently formed Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group (which is not affiliated with Google). A networking hour with food and drinks starting at 5:30pm will be followed by Michael's talk at 6:30pm. Although this is a free event open to all, we do ask that you register in advance.

During the evening, we're also inviting community members to come forward and do short (no more than 5 minutes) demos of their own Google GEO applications during the networking hour. If you would like to participate in that way, please contact me. I'll be coordinating the networking hour demos. That's all, folks.

YouTube / Picasa Web Albums APIs Hackathon at the 'plex

By Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

As promised in my last post announcing the new YouTube developer offerings, we're hosting a hackathon for the YouTube and Picasa Web Albums APIs at the Googleplex on March 27th, 2008.

We'll give overviews of both APIs, go over new features, and run some codelabs to get you started. If you're already familiar with both the APIs, stop by to meet the teams, ask questions, and find other developers to work on projects with.

There will be two sessions -- one from 3PM - 6:30PM and another from 6:30PM - 10PM. Feel free to stay the whole day, or just come for the session you have time for. Don't worry about food and caffeine -- we've got you covered.

Interested? Please RSVP and let us know.

Hope to see you there!

Calling all JavaScript developers: Hack the Day Away with Google

By Ben Lisbakken, Google Developer Programs

On Friday, February 29th, Google will be holding a developer hackathon to get you started on our JavaScript APIs. We will be doing short introductions of the APIs and then breaking up into groups for coding and camaraderie. There will be plenty of Google engineers present to ask questions and get help from. Food will be provided and there will be prizes.

The event is open to anyone in the community that wants to learn about some Google API's, do some coding, or ask some questions. So please bring your laptops and come hang out at Google.

We'll be covering the following APIs:

• Google Gears
• Google AJAX Search/Feeds
• Google Gadgets
• Google Maps
• Google Calendar
• Blogger

The event will be held in two sessions, the first from 2:00PM - 5:30PM and another from 6:00PM - 10:00PM. You are welcome to stay for both.

Seville Tech Talk
Google Campus
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy
Mountain View, CA94043

Friday, February 29th
2:00PM - 5:30PM
6:00PM - 10:00PM

To attend, all you need to do is RSVP and let us know you can make it, and be sure to add the event to your calendar.

Hope to see you there!

IETF Applications Area Architecture Workshop

Post by Joe Gregorio, Google Developer Programs

On February 11 and 12 Google hosted the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Application Area Architecture Workshop. This was a chance for people active in the IETF Applications Area to get together and work on architectural issues, topics that span many specific groups in the Applications area.

The Applications Area is the part of the IETF that deals with applications

"...that is, things that are not security (part of the security area), nor networks (most of the other areas), but rather things that use the networks and security services to provide things of benefit to the end-user."

This was of particular interest to me since that includes specifications like the Atom Syndication Format and the Atom Publishing Protocol, which we use extensively at Google. From the call for participation:

"These should be a few pages of text on some topic related to Applications area architectural issues. Since the group of attendees is expected to span HTTP and AtomPub, email, IM, calendaring, directories and more, issues should be of interest to more than one of these groups. Some existing Applications architecture "modules" that already are reused include SASL, URLs, MIME types, XML and XML schemas and namespaces, HTTP as a substrate, TLS, ABNF, BEEP."

We had around 20 attendees and the breakout sessions ranged over all the topics listed above and many more. There were two days of great conversation and everyone had a good time.

"Thank you for the high quality hosting and convenience of location and food!"

-Lisa Dusseault (Apps Area Director)

Google Technology User Groups

By Christian Schalk, Google Developer Programs

We recently started the Google Technology User Groups program to help people get together and discuss Google developer products at a technical level. One of the first groups formed is the Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group by Java user group veterans Mike "Van" Riper and Kevin Nilson. The first SV-GTUG meetup took place on Google's main campus in January to discuss the Google Web Toolkit with Googler Bob Vawter. The SV-GTUG will be hosting its next meeting on February 6th, where Dick Wall from Google will be presenting on Android.

Silicon Valley is not the only home to new user groups: The Pune GTUG in India, started by Rohit Ghatol, seeks to bring together some of India's vast developer audience to think creatively about using developer APIs to explore what is possible beyond typical Google products.

We'll post again soon about how you can create your own Google Technology User Group, and for more events in your area check out the Developer Events Calendar on Google Code.

Our new Developer Community Calendar: View it, Map it, Add to it!

By Pamela Fox, Google Developer Programs

I was scheduling a trip to New York City last month to visit some friends and thought, "Well, it'd be nice to take in a conference or two." I proceeded to search online for hours -- including queries like "new york city ajax," "conferences new york," "user group new york" -- and came up basically empty handed. Frustrated, I cornered my co-worker Austin Chau, and we did what us geeks tend to do when we want something: we hacked it up ourselves!

Google's 'Developer Events Calendar' has always listed Google-sponsored and/or Google-attended events, but today we're launching a second calendar for the developer community at large. You can view both calendars side-by-side in either calendar view or map view, and with a Google Calendar account, you can add your own meetup to the list. (If you're keen on the project's technical specs, we'll be writing about the code itself shortly, so check back soon for an article and source links.)

We hope you find the calendars useful, and we look forward to your feedback. Try it out now: add your upcoming conference, user group, or party. (Yes, we developers know how to party. If you don't know how, I'll graciously volunteer to show you).