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Machine Learning Communities: Q2 ‘23 highlights and achievements

Posted by Nari Yoon, Bitnoori Keum, Hee Jung, DevRel Community Manager / Soonson Kwon, DevRel Program Manager

Let’s explore highlights and accomplishments of vast Google Machine Learning communities over the second quarter of 2023. We are enthusiastic and grateful about all the activities by the global network of ML communities. Here are the highlights!

ML Training Campaigns Summary

More than 35 communities around the world have hosted ML Campaigns distributed by the ML Developer Programs team during the first half of the year. Thank you all for your training efforts for the entire ML community!


Community Highlights


Keras

Screengrab of Tensorflow & Deep Learning Malaysia June 2023 Webinar - 'KerasCV for the Young and Restless'

Image Segmentation using Composable Fully-Convolutional Networks by ML GDE Suvaditya Mukherjee (India) is a Kears.io example explaining how to implement a fully-convolutional network with a VGG-16 backend and how to use it for performing image segmentation. His presentation, KerasCV for the Young and Restless (slides | video) at TFUG Malaysia and TFUG Kolkata was an introduction to KerasCV. He discussed how basic computer vision components work, why Keras is an important tool, and how KerasCV builds on top of the established TFX and Keras ecosystem.

[ML Story] My Keras Chronicles by ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India) summarized his story of getting into deep learning with Keras. He included pointers as to how one could get into the open source community. Plus, his Kaggle notebook, [0.11] keras starter: unet + tf data pipeline is a starter guide for Vesuvius Challenge. He and Subvaditya also shared Keras implementation of Temporal Latent Bottleneck Networks, proposed in the paper.

KerasFuse by ML GDE Ayse Ayyuce Demirbas (Portugal) is a Python library that combines the power of TensorFlow and Keras with various computer vision techniques for medical image analysis tasks. It provides a collection of modules and functions to facilitate the development of deep learning models in TensorFlow & Keras for tasks such as image segmentation, classification, and more.

TensorFlow at Google I/O 23: A Preview of the New Features and Tools by TFUG Ibadan explored the preview of the latest features and tools in TensorFlow. They covered a wide range of topics including Dtensor, KerasCV & KerasNLP, TF quantization API, and JAX2TF.

StableDiffusion- Textual Inversion app

StableDiffusion - Textual-Inversion implementation app by ML GDE Dimitre Oliveira (Brazil) is an example of how to implement code from research and fine-tunes it using the Textual Inversion process. It also provides relevant use cases for valuable tools and frameworks such as HuggingFace, Gradio, TensorFlow serving, and KerasCV.

In Understanding Gradient Descent and Building an Image Classifier in TF From Scratch, ML GDE Tanmay Bakshi (Canada) talked about how to develop a solid intuition for the fundamentals backing ML tech, and actually built a real image classification system for dogs and cats, from scratch in TF.Keras.

TensorFlow and Keras Implementation of the CVPR 2023 paper by Usha Rengaraju (India) is a research paper implementation of BiFormer: Vision Transformer with Bi-Level Routing Attention.

Smile Detection with Python, OpenCV, and Deep Learning by Rouizi Yacine is a tutorial explaining how to use deep learning to build a more robust smile detector using TensorFlow, Keras, and OpenCV.


Kaggle

Screengrab of ML Olympiad for Students - TopVistos USA

ML Olympiad for Students by GDSC UNINTER was for students and aspiring ML practitioners who want to improve their ML skills. It consisted of a challenge of predicting US working visa applications. 320+ attendees registered for the opening event, 700+ views on YouTube, 66 teams competed, and the winner got a 71% F1-score.

ICR | EDA & Baseline by ML GDE Ertuğrul Demir (Turkey) is a starter notebook for newcomers interested in the latest featured code competition on Kaggle. It got 200+ Upvotes and 490+ forks.

Screengrab of Compete More Effectively on Kaggle using Weights and Biases showing participants in the video call

Compete More Effectively on Kaggle using Weights and Biases by TFUG Hajipur was a meetup to explore techniques using Weights and Biases to improve model performance in Kaggle competitions. Usha Rengaraju (India) joined as a speaker and delivered her insights on Kaggle and strategies to win competitions. She shared tips and tricks and demonstrated how to set up a W&B account and how to integrate with Google Colab and Kaggle.

Skeleton Based Action Recognition: A failed attempt by ML GDE Ayush Thakur (India) is a discussion post about documenting his learnings from competing in the Kaggle competition, Google - Isolated Sign Language Recognition. He shared his repository, training logs, and ideas he approached in the competition. Plus, his article Keras Dense Layer: How to Use It Correctly) explored what the dense layer in Keras is and how it works in practice.


On-device ML

Google for developers Edu Program Tech Talks for Educators Add Machine Learning to your Android App June 22, 2023 12:00pm - 01:00 pm goo.gle/techtalksforedu with headshot of Pankaj Rai GDE - Android, Firebase, Machine Learning

Add Machine Learning to your Android App by ML GDE Pankaj Rai (India) at Tech Talks for Educators was a session on on-device ML and how to add ML capabilities to Android apps such as object detection and gesture detection. He explained capabilities of ML Kit, MediaPipe, TF Lite and how to use these tools. 700+ people registered for his talk.

In MediaPipe with a bit of Bard at I/O Extended Singapore 2023, ML GDE Martin Andrews (Singapore) shared how MediaPipe fits into the ecosystem, and showed 4 different demonstrations of MediaPipe functionality: audio classification, facial landmarks, interactive segmentation, and text classification.

Adding ML to our apps with Google ML Kit and MediaPipe by ML GDE Juan Guillermo Gomez Torres (Bolivia) introduced ML Kit & MediaPipe, and the benefits of on-device ML. In Startup Academy México (Google for Startups), he shared how to increase the value for clients with ML and MediaPipe.


LLM

Introduction to Google's PaLM 2 API by ML GDE Hannes Hapke (United States) introduced how to use PaLM2 and summarized major advantages of it. His another article The role of ML Engineering in the time of GPT-4 & PaLM 2 explains the role of ML experts in finding the right balance and alignment among stakeholders to optimally navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by this emerging technology. He did presentations under the same title at North America Connect 2023 and the GDG Portland event.

Image of a cellphone with ChatBard on the display in front of a computer display with Firebase PaLM in Cloud Firestore

ChatBard : An Intelligent Customer Service Center App by ML GDE Ruqiya Bin Safi (Saudi Arabia) is an intelligent customer service center app powered by generative AI and LLMs using PaLM2 APIs.

Bard can now code and put that code in Colab for you by ML GDE Sam Witteveen (Singapore) showed how Bard makes code. He runs a Youtube channel exploring ML and AI, with playlists such as Generative AI, Paper Reviews, LLMs, and LangChain.

Google’s Bard Can Write Code by ML GDE Bhavesh Bhatt (India) shows the coding capabilities of Bard, how to create a 2048 game with it, and how to add some basic features to the game. He also uploaded videos about LangChain in a playlist and introduced Google Cloud’s new course on Generative AI in this video.

Screengrab of GDG Deep Learning Course Attention Mechanisms and Transformers led by Ruqiya Bin Safi ML GDE & WTM Ambassador, @Ru0Sa

Attention Mechanisms and Transformers by GDG Cloud Saudi talked about Attention and Transformer in NLP and ML GDE Ruqiya Bin Safi (Saudi Arabia) participated as a speaker. Another event, Hands-on with the PaLM2 API to create smart apps(Jeddah) explored what LLMs, PaLM2, and Bard are, how to use PaLM2 API, and how to create smart apps using PaLM2 API.

Hands-on with Generative AI: Google I/O Extended [Virtual] by ML GDE Henry Ruiz (United States) and Web GDE Rabimba Karanjai (United States) was a workshop on generative AI showing hands-on demons of how to get started using tools such as PaLM API, Hugging Face Transformers, and LangChain framework.

Generative AI with Google PaLM and MakerSuite by ML GDE Kuan Hoong (Malaysia) at Google I/O Extended George Town 2023 was a talk about LLMs with Google PaLM and MakerSuite. The event hosted by GDG George Town and also included ML topics such as LLMs, responsible AI, and MLOps.

Intor to Gen AI with PaLM API and MakerSuite led by GUS Luis Gustavo and Tensorflow User Group Sao Paolo

Intro to Gen AI with PaLM API and MakerSuite by TFUG São Paulo was for people who want to learn generative AI and how Google tools can help with adoption and value creation. They covered how to start prototyping Gen AI ideas with MakerSuite and how to access advanced features of PaLM2 and PaLM API. The group also hosted Opening Pandora's box: Understanding the paper that revolutionized the field of NLP (video) and ML GDE Pedro Gengo (Brazil) and ML GDE Vinicius Caridá (Brazil) shared the secret behind the famous LLM and other Gen AI models.The group members studied Attention Is All You Need paper together and learned the full potential that the technology can offer.

Language models which PaLM can speak, see, move, and understand by GDG Cloud Taipei was for those who want to understand the concept and application of PaLM. ML GED Jerry Wu (Taiwan) shared the PaLM’s main characteristics, functions, and etc.

Flow chart illustrating flexible serving structure of stable diffusion

Serving With TF and GKE: Stable Diffusion by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) and ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) discusses how TF Serving and Kubernetes Engine can serve a system with online deployment. They broke down Stable Diffusion into main components and how they influence the subsequent consideration for deployment. Then they also covered the deployment-specific bits such as TF Serving deployment and k8s cluster configuration.

TFX + W&B Integration by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) shows how KerasTuner can be used with W&B’s experiment tracking feature within the TFX Tuner component. He developed a custom TFX component to push a full-trained model to the W&B Artifact store and publish a working application on Hugging Face Space with the current version of the model. Also, his talk titled, ML Infra and High Level Framework in Google Cloud Platform, delivered what MLOps is, why it is hard, why cloud + TFX is a good starter, and how TFX is seamlessly integrated with Vertex AI and Dataflow. He shared use cases from the past projects that he and ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) have done in the last 2 years.

Open and Collaborative MLOps by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) was a talk about why openness and collaboration are two important aspects of MLOps. He gave an overview of Hugging Face Hub and how it integrates well with TFX to promote openness and collaboration in MLOps workflows.


ML Research

Paper review: PaLM 2 Technical Report by ML GDE Grigory Sapunov (UK) looked into the details of PaLM2 and the paper. He shares reviews of papers related to Google and DeepMind through his social channels and here are some of them: Model evaluation for extreme risks (paper), Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep reinforcement learning (paper), Power-seeking can be probable and predictive for trained agents (paper).

Learning JAX in 2023: Part 3 — A Step-by-Step Guide to Training Your First Machine Learning Model with JAX by ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India) and ML GDE Ritwik Raha (India) shows how JAX can train linear and nonlinear regression models and the usage of PyTrees library to train a multilayer perceptron model. In addition, at May 2023 Meetup hosted by TFUG Mumbai, they gave a talk titled Decoding End to End Object Detection with Transformers and covered the architecture of the mode and the various components that led to DETR’s inception.

20 steps to train a deployed version of the GPT model on TPU by ML GDE Jerry Wu (Taiwan) shared how to use JAX and TPU to train and infer Chinese question-answering data.

Photo of the audience from the back of the room at Developer Space @Google Singapore during Multimodal Transformers - Custom LLMs, ViTs & BLIPs

Multimodal Transformers - Custom LLMs, ViTs & BLIPs by TFUG Singapore looked at what models, systems, and techniques have come out recently related to multimodal tasks. ML GDE Sam Witteveen (Singapore) looked into various multimodal models and systems and how you can build your own with the PaLM2 Model. In June, this group invited Blaise Agüera y Arcas (VP and Fellow at Google Research) and shared the Cerebra project and the research going on at Google DeepMind including the current and future developments in generative AI and emerging trends.


TensorFlow

Training a recommendation model with dynamic embeddings by ML GDE Thushan Ganegedara (Australia) explains how to build a movie recommender model by leveraging TensorFlow Recommenders (TFRS) and TensorFlow Recommenders Addons (TFRA). The primary focus was to show how the dynamic embeddings provided in the TFRA library can be used to dynamically grow and shrink the size of the embedding tables in the recommendation setting.

Screengrab of a tweet by Mathis Hammel showcasing his talk, 'How I built the most efficient deepfake detector in the world for $100'

How I built the most efficient deepfake detector in the world for $100 by ML GDE Mathis Hammel (France) was a talk exploring a method to detect images generated via ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com and even a way to know the exact time the photo was produced. Plus, his Twitter thread, OSINT Investigation on LinkedIn, investigated a network of fake companies on LinkedIn. He used a homemade tool based on a TensorFlow model and hosted it on Google Cloud. Technical explanations of generative neural networks were also included. More than 701K people viewed this thread and it got 1200+ RTs and 3100+ Likes.

Screengrab of Few-shot learning: Creating a real-time object detection using TensorFlow and python by ML GDE Hugo Zanini

Few-shot learning: Creating a real-time object detection using TensorFlow and Python by ML GDE Hugo Zanini (Brazil) shows how to take pictures of an object using a webcam, label the images, and train a few-shot learning model to run in real-time. Also, his article, Custom YOLOv7 Object Detection with TensorFlow.js explains how he trained a custom YOLOv7 model to run it directly in the browser in real time and offline with TensorFlow.js.

The Lord of the Words Transformation of a Sequence Encoder/Decoder Attention

The Lord of the Words : The Return of the experiments with DVC (slides) by ML GDE Gema Parreno Piqueras (Spain) was a talk explaining Transformers in the neural machine learning scenario, and how to use Tensorflow and DVC. In the project, she used Tensorflow Datasets translation catalog to load data from various languages, and TensorFlow Transformers library to train several models.

Accelerate your TensorFlow models with XLA (slides) and Ship faster TensorFlow models with XLA by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) shared how to accelerate TensorFlow models with XLA in Cloud Community Days Kolkata 2023 and Cloud Community Days Pune 2023.

Setup of NVIDIA Merlin and Tensorflow for Recommendation Models by ML GDE Rubens Zimbres (Brazil) presented a review of recommendation algorithms as well as the Two Towers algorithm, and setup of NVIDIA Merlin on premises and on Vertex AI.


Cloud

AutoML pipeline for tabular data on VertexAI in Go by ML GDE Paolo Galeone (Italy) delved into the development and deployment of tabular models using VertexAI and AutoML with Go, showcasing the actual Go code and sharing insights gained through trial & error and extensive Google research to overcome documentation limitations.

Search engine architecture

Beyond images: searching information in videos using AI (slides) by ML GDE Pedro Gengo (Brazil) and ML GDE Vinicius Caridá (Brazil) showed how to create a search engine where you can search for information in videos. They presented an architecture where they transcribe the audio and caption the frames, convert this text into embeddings, and save them in a vector DB to be able to search given a user query.

The secret sauce to creating amazing ML experiences for developers by ML GDE Gant Laborde (United States) was a podcast sharing his “aha” moment, 20 years of experience in ML, and the secret to creating enjoyable and meaningful experiences for developers.

What's inside Google’s Generative AI Studio? by ML GDE Gad Benram (Portugal) shared the preview of the new features and what you can expect from it. Additionally, in How to pitch Vertex AI in 2023, he shared the six simple and honest sales pitch points for Google Cloud representatives on how to convince customers that Vertex AI is the right platform.

In How to build a conversational AI Augmented Reality Experience with Sachin Kumar, ML GDE Sachin Kumar (Qatar) talked about how to build an AR app combining multiple technologies like Google Cloud AI, Unity, and etc. The session walked through the step-by-step process of building the app from scratch.

Machine Learning on Google Cloud Platform led by Nitin Tiwari, Google Developer Expert - Machine Learning, Software Engineer @LTMIMindtree

Machine Learning on Google Cloud Platform by ML GDE Nitin Tiwari (India) was a mentoring aiming to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the processes involved in training an ML model and deploying it using GCP. In Building robust ML solutions with TensorFlow and GCP, he shared how to leverage the capabilities of GCP and TensorFlow for ML solutions and deploy custom ML models.

Data to AI on Google cloud: Auto ML, Gen AI, and more by TFUG Prayagraj educated students on how to leverage Google Cloud’s advanced AI technologies, including AutoML and generative AI.

Machine Learning Communities: Q1 ‘23 highlights and achievements

Posted by Nari Yoon, Bitnoori Keum, Hee Jung, DevRel Community Manager / Soonson Kwon, DevRel Program Manager

Let’s explore highlights and accomplishments of vast Google Machine Learning communities over the first quarter of 2023. We are enthusiastic and grateful about all the activities by the global network of ML communities. Here are the highlights!



ML Campaigns



ML Community Sprint

ML Community Sprint is a campaign, a collaborative attempt bridging ML GDEs with Googlers to produce relevant content for the broader ML community. Throughout Feb and Mar, MediaPipe/TF Recommendation Sprint was carried out and 5 projects were completed.


ML Olympiad 2023
I'm hosting a competiton ML Olympiad 2023 #MLOlympiad

ML Olympiad is an associated Kaggle Community Competitions hosted by ML GDE, TFUG, 3rd-party ML communities, supported by Google Developers. The second, ML Olympiad 2023 has wrapped up successfully with 17 competitions and 300+ participants addressing important issues of our time - diversity, environments, etc. Competition highlights include Breast Cancer Diagnosis, Water Quality Prediction, Detect ChatGpt answers, Ensure healthy lives, etc. Thank you all for participating in ML Olympiad 2023!

Also, “ML Paper Reading Clubs” (GalsenAI and TFUG Dhaka), “ML Math Clubs” (TFUG Hajipur and TFUG Dhaka) and “ML Study Jams” (TFUG Bauchi) were hosted by ML communities around the world.


Community Highlights



Keras
Screen shot of Fine-tuning Stable Diffusion using Keras

Various ways of serving Stable Diffusion by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) and ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) shares how to deploy Stable Diffusion with TF Serving, Hugging Face Endpoint, and FastAPI. Their other project Fine-tuning Stable Diffusion using Keras provides how to fine-tune the image encoder of Stable Diffusion on a custom dataset consisting of image-caption pairs.

Serving TensorFlow models with TFServing by ML GDE Dimitre Oliveira (Brazil) is a tutorial explaining how to create a simple MobileNet using the Keras API and how to serve it with TF Serving.

Fine-tuning the multilingual T5 model from Huggingface with Keras by ML GDE Radostin Cholakov (Bulgaria) shows a minimalistic approach for training text generation architectures from Hugging Face with TensorFlow and Keras as the backend.


Image showing a range of low-lit pictures enhanced incljuding inference time and ther metrics

Lighting up Images in the Deep Learning Era by ML GDE Soumik Rakshit (India), ML GDE Saurav Maheshkar (UK), ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India), and Samarendra Dash explores deep learning techniques for low-light image enhancement. The article also talks about a library, Restorers, providing TensorFlow and Keras implementations of SoTA image and video restoration models for tasks such as low-light enhancement, denoising, deblurring, super-resolution, etc.

How to Use Cosine Decay Learning Rate Scheduler in Keras? by ML GDE Ayush Thakur (India) introduces how to correctly use the cosine-decay learning rate scheduler using Keras API.


Screen shot of Implementation of DreamBooth using KerasCV and TensorFlow

Implementation of DreamBooth using KerasCV and TensorFlow (Keras.io tutorial) by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) and ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) demonstrates DreamBooth technique to fine-tune Stable Diffusion in KerasCV and TensorFlow. Training code, inference notebooks, a Keras.io tutorial, and more are in the repository. Sayak also shared his story, [ML Story] DreamBoothing Your Way into Greatness on the GDE blog.

Focal Modulation: A replacement for Self-Attention by ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India) shares a Keras implementation of the paper. Usha Rengaraju (India) shared Keras Implementation of NeurIPS 2021 paper, Augmented Shortcuts for Vision Transformers.

Images classification with TensorFlow & Keras (video) by TFUG Abidjan explained how to define an ML model that can classify images according to the category using a CNN.

Hands-on Workshop on KerasNLP by GDG NYC, GDG Hoboken, and Stevens Institute of Technology shared how to use pre-trained Transformers (including BERT) to classify text, fine-tune it on custom data, and build a Transformer from scratch.


On-device ML

Stable diffusion example in an android application — Part 1 & Part 2 by ML GDE George Soloupis (Greece) demonstrates how to deploy a Stable Diffusion pipeline inside an Android app.

AI for Art and Design by ML GDE Margaret Maynard-Reid (United States) delivered a brief overview of how AI can be used to assist and inspire artists & designers in their creative space. She also shared a few use cases of on-device ML for creating artistic Android apps.


ML Engineering (MLOps)
Overall system architecture of End-to-End Pipeline for Segmentation with TFX, Google Cloud, and Hugging Face

End-to-End Pipeline for Segmentation with TFX, Google Cloud, and Hugging Face by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) and ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) discussed the crucial details of building an end-to-end ML pipeline for Semantic Segmentation tasks with TFX and various Google Cloud services such as Dataflow, Vertex Pipelines, Vertex Training, and Vertex Endpoint. The pipeline uses a custom TFX component that is integrated with Hugging Face Hub - HFPusher.

Extend your TFX pipeline with TFX-Addons by ML GDE Hannes Hapke (United States) explains how you can use the TFX-Addons components or examples.



Textual Inversion Pipeline architecture

Textual Inversion Pipeline for Stable Diffusion by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea) demonstrates how to manage multiple models and their prototype applications of fine-tuned Stable Diffusion on new concepts by Textual Inversion.

Running a Stable Diffusion Cluster on GCP with tensorflow-serving (Part 1 | Part 2) by ML GDE Thushan Ganegedara (Australia) explains how to set up a GKE cluster, how to use Terraform to set up and manage infrastructure on GCP, and how to deploy a model on GKE using TF Serving.


Photo of Googler Joinal Ahmed giving a talk at TFUG Bangalore

Scalability of ML Applications by TFUG Bangalore focused on the challenges and solutions related to building and deploying ML applications at scale. Googler Joinal Ahmed gave a talk entitled Scaling Large Language Model training and deployments.

Discovering and Building Applications with Stable Diffusion by TFUG São Paulo was for people who are interested in Stable Diffusion. They shared how Stable Diffusion works and showed a complete version created using Google Colab and Vertex AI in production.


Responsible AI
Thumbnail image for Between the Brackets Fairness & Ethics in AI: Perspectives from Journalism, Medicine and Translation

In Fairness & Ethics In AI: From Journalism, Medicine and Translation, ML GDE Samuel Marks (United States) discussed responsible AI.

In The new age of AI: A Convo with Google Brain, ML GDE Vikram Tiwari (United States) discussed responsible AI, open-source vs. closed-source, and the future of LLMs.

Responsible IA Toolkit (video) by ML GDE Lesly Zerna (Bolivia) and Google DSC UNI was a meetup to discuss ethical and sustainable approaches to AI development. Lesly shared about the “ethic” side of building AI products as well as learning about “Responsible AI from Google”, PAIR guidebook, and other experiences to build AI.

Women in AI/ML at Google NYC by GDG NYC discussed hot topics, including LLMs and generative AI. Googler Priya Chakraborty gave a talk entitled Privacy Protections for ML Models.


ML Research

Efficient Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems with Response Selection as an Auxiliary Task by ML GDE Radostin Cholakov (Bulgaria) showcases how, in a task-oriented setting, the T5-small language model can perform on par with existing systems relying on T5-base or even bigger models.

Learning JAX in 2023: Part 1 / Part 2 / Livestream video by ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India) and ML GDE Ritwik Raha (India) covered the power tools of JAX, namely grad, jit, vmap, pmap, and also discussed the nitty-gritty of randomness in JAX.


Screen grab from JAX Streams: Parallelism with Flax | Ep4 with David Cardozo and Cristian Garcia

In Deep Learning Mentoring MILA Quebec, ML GDE David Cardozo (Canada) did mentoring for M.Sc and Ph.D. students who have interests in JAX and MLOps. JAX Streams: Parallelism with Flax | EP4 by David and ML GDE Cristian Garcia (Columbia) explored Flax’s new APIs to support parallelism.

March Machine Learning Meetup hosted by TFUG Kolkata. Two sessions were delivered: 1) You don't know TensorFlow by ML GDE Sayak Paul (India) presented some under-appreciated and under-used features of TensorFlow. 2) A Guide to ML Workflows with JAX by ML GDE Aritra Roy Gosthipaty (India), ML GDE Soumik Rakshit (India), and ML GDE Ritwik Raha (India) delivered on how one could think of using JAX functional transformations for their ML workflows.

A paper review of PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model by ML GDE Grigory Sapunov (UK) explained the details of the model. He also shared his slide deck about NLP in 2022.

An annotated paper of On the importance of noise scheduling in Diffusion Models by ML GDE Aakash Nain (India) outlined the effects of noise schedule on the performance of diffusion models and strategies to get a better schedule for optimal performance.


TensorFlow

Three projects were awarded as TF Community Spotlight winners: 1) Semantic Segmentation model within ML pipeline by ML GDE Chansung Park (Korea), ML GDE Sayak Paul (India), and ML GDE Merve Noyan (France), 2) GatedTabTransformer in TensorFlow + TPU / in Flax by Usha Rengaraju, and 3) Real-time Object Detection in the browser with YOLOv7 and TF.JS by ML GDE Hugo Zanini (Brazil).

Building ranking models powered by multi-task learning with Merlin and TensorFlow by ML GDE Gabriel Moreira (Brazil) describes how to build TensorFlow models with Merlin for recommender systems using multi-task learning.


Transform your Web Apps with Machine Learning: Unleashing the Power of Open-Source Python Libraries like TensorFlow Hub & Gradio Bhjavesh Bhatt @_bhaveshbhatt

Building ML Powered Web Applications using TensorFlow Hub & Gradio (slide) by ML GDE Bhavesh Bhatt (India) demonstrated how to use TF Hub & Gradio to create a fully functional ML-powered web application. The presentation was held as part of an event called AI Evolution with TensorFlow, covering the fundamentals of ML & TF, hosted by TFUG Nashik.

create-tf-app (repository) by ML GDE Radostin Cholakov (Bulgaria) shows how to set up and maintain an ML project in Tensorflow with a single script.


Cloud

Creating scalable ML solutions to support big techs evolution (slide) by ML GDE Mikaeri Ohana (Brazil) shared how Google can help big techs to generate impact through ML with scalable solutions.

Search of Brazilian Laws using Dialogflow CX and Matching Engine by ML GDE Rubens Zimbres (Brazil) shows how to build a chatbot with Dialogflow CX and query a database of Brazilian laws by calling an endpoint in Cloud Run.


4x4 grid of sample results from Vintedois Diffusion model

Stable Diffusion Finetuning by ML GDE Pedro Gengo (Brazil) and ML GDE Piero Esposito (Brazil) is a fine-tuned Stable Diffusion 1.5 with more aesthetic images. They used Vertex AI with multiple GPUs to fine-tune it. It reached Hugging Face top 3 and more than 150K people downloaded and tested it.

From Developer to Teacher, How a Computer Science Professor Found Career Support with Google Developer Groups

Posted by Kübra Zengin, North America Regional Lead, Google Developers

A Path to Programming

“I was hooked from the start,” says Jennifer Bailey about programming. Always interested in the way systems work, Jennifer, now an educator in Colorado, found her path to programming in an unconventional way. She first earned a General Educational Development degree, otherwise known as a “GED” in the United States, from Aims Community College, when she was only 15 years old.

Ever a quick learner with the ambition to excel, she then secured an associate’s degree, bachelor’s, and master’s degree in Applied Science. With degrees in hand, she taught herself C Sharp while working at a local firm as a software developer building desktop applications.

When one of her mentors from Aims Community College was retiring, the school recognized Jennifer’s programming expertise and hired her to teach computer science in 2011. The administration then asked her to create the college’s certificate in mobile application development from scratch. To build out a curriculum for her new assignment, she needed to find some inspiration. As Jennifer sought out resources to curate the content for the college’s new program in mobile development, she found a local Google Developer Group (GDG), an organization where local developers came together to discuss cutting-edge programming topics.

Finding a Google Developer Group in Northern Colorado

She attended her first event with the group that same week. At the event, the group’s leader was teaching attendees to build Android apps, and other developers taught Jennifer how to use GitHub.

“I went to that in-person event, and it was everything I was hoping it would be,” Jennifer says. “I was just blown away that I was able to find that resource at exactly the time when I needed it for my professional development, and I was really happy because I had so much fun.”

The community of welcoming developers that Jennifer found in GDG drew her in, and for the first time at a technical networking event like this one, she felt comfortable meeting new people. “That initial event was the first time I felt like I had met actual friends, and I’ve been involved with GDG ever since,” she says.

A Life-Changing Community

As time progressed, Jennifer started attending GDG events more often, and eventually offered the meeting space at Aims Community College where the group could gather. After she made the offer, the group's organizers invited her to become a co-leader of the group. Fast-forward to the present, and her leadership role has led to numerous exciting opportunities, like attending Google I/O and meeting Google developers from all over the world.

“By participating in GDG, I ended up being able to attend Google I/O,” says Jennifer. “This community has had a massive impact in my life.”

Ongoing Education

Jennifer’s local GDG provides support for Android that helps other learners while also remaining helpful to her teaching of computer science subjects and the Android IOS mobile developer certificate.

“What keeps me engaged with Google technology, especially with Android, is all of the updates, changes, new ideas and new technology,” she says.

Jennifer notes that she appreciates the Android ecosystem’s constantly evolving technology and open source tools.

  • After becoming fascinated with Android, Jennifer discovered that the more time she spent learning and delving into Android, the more she learned and gained expertise that she could apply to other platforms.
  • Jennifer’s Android expertise has also led to her becoming an author for Ray Wenderlich, for whom she contributed to Saving Data on Android and Android Accessibility by Tutorials and a video course on building your first app using Android and Kotlin. “I like Jetpack Compose a lot, and I’m very interested in Android accessibility, so I can’t wait to update that book,” she says.
  • She served as editor on an article about “Lazy Composables” on lists.

Positive Career Impact

In Jennifer’s view, involvement with Google Developer Groups positively impacted her career by exposing her to a local group of developers with whom she is deeply connected, providing resources and instruction on Android, and providing her with a leadership opportunity.

“I have met such a diverse sampling of people in Google Developer Groups, from all different industries, with all different levels of experience–from students, self-taught, to someone who’s been in technology longer than I have,” Jennifer says. “You never know who you will meet out there because GDG is filled with interesting people, and you never know what opportunities you will find by mixing with those people and comparing notes.”

If you’re looking to grow as a developer, find a GDG group near you. Learn more about Google Developer Groups and find a community near you!

South African developers build web application to help local athletes

Posted by Aniedi Udo-Obong, Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Lead, Google Developer Groups

Lesego Ndlovu and Simon Mokgotlhoa have stayed friends since they were eight years old, trading GameBoy cartridges and playing soccer. They live three houses away from each other in Soweto, the biggest township in South Africa, with over one million residents. The two friends have always been fascinated by technology, and by the time the duo attended university, they wanted to start a business together that would also help their community.

Lesego Ndlovu and Simon Mokgotlhoa sitting at a desk on their computers

After teaching themselves to code and attending Google Developer Groups (GDG) events in Johannesburg, they built a prototype and launched a chapter of their own (GDG Soweto) to teach other new developers how to code and build technology careers.

Building an app to help their community

Lesego and Simon wanted to build an application that would help the talented soccer players in their community get discovered and recruited by professional soccer teams. To do that, they had to learn to code.

Lesego Ndlovu and Simon Mokgotlhoa holding their phones towards the screen showcasing the Ball Talent app

“We always played soccer, and we saw talented players not get discovered, so, given our interest in sports and passion for technology, we wanted to make something that could change that narrative,” Lesego says. “We watched videos on the Chrome Developers YouTube channel and learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but we didn’t know how to make an app, deliver a product, or start a business. Our tech journey became a business journey. We learned about the code as the business grew. It’s been a great journey.”

After many all-nighters learning frontend development using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and working on their project, they built BallTalent, a Progressive Web App (PWA), that helps local soccer players in their neighborhood get discovered by professional soccer clubs. They record games in their neighborhood and upload them to the app, so clubs can identify new talent.

“We tested our prototype with people, and it seemed like they really loved it, which pushed us to keep coding and improving on the project,” says Simon. “The application is currently focused on soccer, but it’s built it in a way that it can focus on other sports.”

In 2019, when BallTalent launched, the project placed in the top 5 of one of South Africa’s most prestigious competitions, Diageo Social Tech Startup Challenge. BallTalent has helped local soccer players match with professional teams, benefiting the community. Simon and Lesego plan to release version two soon, with a goal of expanding to other sports.

Learning to code with web technologies and resources

Lesego and Simon chose to watch the Chrome Developers YouTube channel to learn to code, because it was free, accessible, and taught programming in ways that were easy to understand. Preferring to continue to use free Google tools because of their availability and ease of use, Lesego and Simon used Google developer tools on Chrome to build and test the BallTalent app, which is hosted on Google Cloud Platform.

BallTalent Shows Youth Talent to the Worlds Best Scouts and Clubs

They used NodeJS as their backend runtime environment to stay within the Google ecosystem–NodeJS is powered by the V8 JavaScript engine, which is developed by the Chromium Project. They used a service worker codelab from Google to allow users to install the BallTalent PWA and see partial content, even without an internet connection.

We are focused on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, frontend frameworks like Angular, and Cloud tools like Firebase, to be able to equip people with the knowledge of how to set up an application,” says Simon.

Moving gif of soccer players playing on a soccer field

BallTalent shares sample footage of a previous match: Mangaung United Vs Bizana Pondo Chiefs, during the ABC Motsepe Play Offs

“Google has been with us the whole way,” says Simon.

Contributing to the Google Developer community

Because of their enthusiasm for web technologies and positive experience learning to code using Google tools, Lesego and Simon were enthusiastic about joining a Google Developer Community. They became regular members at GDG Johannesburg and went to DevFest South Africa in 2018, where they got inspired to start their own GDG chapter in Soweto. The chapter focuses on frontend development to meet the needs of a largely beginner developer membership and has grown to 500+ members.

Looking forward to continued growth

The duo is now preparing to launch the second version of their BallTalent app, which gives back to their community by pairing local soccer talent with professional teams seeking players. In addition, they’re teaching new developers in their township how to build their own apps, building community and creating opportunities for new developers. Google Developer Groups are local community groups for developers interested in learning new skills, teaching others, and connecting with other developers. We encourage you to join us, and if you’re interested in becoming a GDG organizer like Simon and Lesego, we encourage you to apply.

Exploring accessibility through community with Pescara’s Google Developer Group

Posted by Alessandro Palmieri, Regional Lead, Europe, Google Developer Groups

Blue banner with text that reads Exploring accessibility through community in GDG Pescara. Includes an image of two men giving standing in front of a projector screen

You never quite know exactly how someone else experiences the world - but making an effort to connect and understand others remains a hallmark of a strong community. In November 2019, Google Developer Group Pescara invited backend developer Filippo Tenaglia to speak at a local DevFest program, as part of the global developer event. The group turned the lights down and connected Filippo’s PC to the room’s speakers, and Filippo told attendees about his life as a visually impaired developer. He let them hear what he hears when he works with the code and let them hear the different speech synthesizers he uses: the one he uses to browse on the Internet, as well as the one that he uses to read source code, that reads any punctuation character.

One attendee asked Filippo how many lines of code he’s able to remember without seeing them, and Filippo answered, “I have to remember the whole block. I can’t see the code, so I memorize it. Usually, I can remember 20, even 30 lines of code.” The attendee replied, “you’re a dragon,” alluding to folklore that the mystical creatures have strong memories. Filippo laughed, and his colleague, Gregorio Palama, leader of GDG Pescara, says he got goosebumps.

Gregorio met Filippo when the two worked together at an IT consultancy. Filippo brought his guide dog Lila to work and impressed Gregario with his remarkable ability to memorize 20-30 lines of code at a time. Filippo used assistive technology, like speech synthesizers and screen readers, as well as his extraordinary memorization ability, to code. Through his friendship with Filippo, Gregorio came to understand the importance of accessibility.

Gregorio uses his Google Developer Group (GDG) Pescara community, in a small city in the central part of Italy, to advocate for people with disabilities and educate other developers about the technical tools needed to make programming, websites, and software truly accessible for the visually impaired.

Leveraging tools to stay connected

Developers with visual impairments similar to Fillipo can leverage assistive technology in Chrome like screen readers and magnifiers. When browsing the web using various accessibility extensions, there are ways for people with visual impairments to make the browser more accessible, without installing external software.

Through their friendship, Filippo continued to educate Gregorio about accessibility when he called Gregorio to volunteer for more GDG Pescara events in Italy. Filippo explained that he was calling because the group’s community messaging platform and application, where they post calls for volunteers and share event details, isn’t accessible, so Fialippo can’t see the posted information and needs to use a different method of staying up to date on GDG activities.

Using community to share the importance of accessibility

GDG Pescara plans to host a DevFest focused accessibility and other selected topics. The organizers are thinking of having a hackathon that could expose developers to Google’s accessibility tools, like the ChromeVox screen reader, which developers can use to test the accessibility of their web apps, or Chrome’s documentation on designing accessible extensions. With this community-led programming, Gregorio and his team hope to inspire other developers to build new accessibility tools, like a better community platform.

Through his friendship with Filippo, Gregorio learned the importance of accessibility. Now, he is using his GDG community and a suite of tools to help educate about accessibility and advocate for people with disabilities.

If you’re inspired to lead fellow developers into an exploration of accessibility in technology, we encourage you to join a GDG near you, or consider leading a GDG chapter. You can learn more about Google’s accessibility initiatives and developer tools here and check out an upcoming GDG community accessibility awareness event here.

How an Android developer in Guatemala advocates for women through the Google Developer Groups community

Posted by Rodrigo Akira Hirooka, Regional Lead, Latin America

Getting acquainted with Android career options

Cecilia Castillo loves mobile development. She’s confident that she’d be happy focusing on it for the rest of her career. Cecilia’s career in mobile development began when her friend Adrian Catalan (Director of the Innovation Lab at Galileo University), launched a Google Developer Groups (GDG) chapter in Guatemala and began to teach Android courses.

Up until that point, Cecilia had used technologies like ASPX and Ruby on Rails – and was no stranger to technical concepts, having studied computer science at Galileo University in Guatemala and earned a Master’s degree in information technology, but she was also itching to learn something new in a supportive environment. That’s when she attended a locally organized GDG event. “ I got more involved in GDG meetups and helped organize them, and I learned how to code in Android.”

Woman with long straight hair holding a microphone standing in front of a projector screen giving a presentation

“Mobile experiences are often the first interaction people have with a product or service. An experience on mobile can determine whether someone will love it or hate it, and I think that is a big responsibility and a privilege.”

2013: a pivotal year of community leadership

In time, she found the GDG community helped her feel a sense of camaraderie in the LATAM tech community and in 2013, Cecilia decided to attend Google I/O. She found it “life-changing,” she says, and loved being able to share her enthusiasm for mobile development with more people from all over the world.

That very year, Cecilia began helping plan International Women’s Day back home in Guatemala and helped run the first International Women’s Day (IWD) event there. “It was the start of something exciting. I was always passionate about creating spaces where other women could share their experiences, their talents, and everything technical they were learning,” she says.

She says IWD events make it possible for her to meet women from all over the world who are doing interesting work in technology. In addition, Cecilia says International Women’s Day events and GDG groups create momentum around the idea that women are tech experts and leaders.

Inspiring other female leaders and improving the local programs

Cecilia says she and her planning team try to make their IWD event bigger and better every year, making sure to invite a combination of new speakers and women with more experience who have been giving talks and working in tech for a while.

The Innovation Lab at Galileo University now supports the two-day virtual event, which occurred on March 11-12 this year. This year’s event included student-focused programming to encourage prospective developers to pursue tech careers or apply tech to their interests. Around 70 speakers participated, some from different countries in Latin America and others from Guatemala.

Blue graphic advertising an International Women's Day Event hosted in Guatemala

Cecilia says the university has played an important role to help the GDG chapter achieve its goal of more visibility and reaching a broader audience. Furthermore, Celicila recognized that Evelyn Cruz, lead of the Engineering Education Group at Galileo University, has been instrumental during the planning process.

Looking ahead to new opportunities

“I think it is important to create moments and spaces where we can celebrate and spotlight all the amazing things women are doing,” says Cecilia. “By being part of a bigger network like GDG, we also get to know and learn from talented women from all over Latin America and the world.

Woman in white shirt with long straight hair standing and smiling with a giant Android logo robot

“The GDG community offers a very diverse group of people, and I think this diversity of countries, companies, and expertise adds value for anyone who is involved in these communities.”

Developing those initial Android skills has paid off, as Castillo now serves as a co-organizer for Google Developer Group (GDG) in Guatemala, holds a position as a Women Techmakers ambassador, and works as a Senior Mobile Engineer at PayPal. In this role she works on both Android and iOS platforms and she’s now giving back to the community in so many ways.

Learn more about Google Developer Groups and how to join or start one near you here.

How an Android developer in Guatemala advocates for women through the Google Developer Groups community

Posted by Rodrigo Akira Hirooka, Regional Lead, Latin America

Getting acquainted with Android career options

Cecilia Castillo loves mobile development. She’s confident that she’d be happy focusing on it for the rest of her career. Cecilia’s career in mobile development began when her friend Adrian Catalan (Director of the Innovation Lab at Galileo University), launched a Google Developer Groups (GDG) chapter in Guatemala and began to teach Android courses.

Up until that point, Cecilia had used technologies like ASPX and Ruby on Rails – and was no stranger to technical concepts, having studied computer science at Galileo University in Guatemala and earned a Master’s degree in information technology, but she was also itching to learn something new in a supportive environment. That’s when she attended a locally organized GDG event. “ I got more involved in GDG meetups and helped organize them, and I learned how to code in Android.”

Woman with long straight hair holding a microphone standing in front of a projector screen giving a presentation

“Mobile experiences are often the first interaction people have with a product or service. An experience on mobile can determine whether someone will love it or hate it, and I think that is a big responsibility and a privilege.”

2013: a pivotal year of community leadership

In time, she found the GDG community helped her feel a sense of camaraderie in the LATAM tech community and in 2013, Cecilia decided to attend Google I/O. She found it “life-changing,” she says, and loved being able to share her enthusiasm for mobile development with more people from all over the world.

That very year, Cecilia began helping plan International Women’s Day back home in Guatemala and helped run the first International Women’s Day (IWD) event there. “It was the start of something exciting. I was always passionate about creating spaces where other women could share their experiences, their talents, and everything technical they were learning,” she says.

She says IWD events make it possible for her to meet women from all over the world who are doing interesting work in technology. In addition, Cecilia says International Women’s Day events and GDG groups create momentum around the idea that women are tech experts and leaders.

Inspiring other female leaders and improving the local programs

Cecilia says she and her planning team try to make their IWD event bigger and better every year, making sure to invite a combination of new speakers and women with more experience who have been giving talks and working in tech for a while.

The Innovation Lab at Galileo University now supports the two-day virtual event, which occurred on March 11-12 this year. This year’s event included student-focused programming to encourage prospective developers to pursue tech careers or apply tech to their interests. Around 70 speakers participated, some from different countries in Latin America and others from Guatemala.

Blue graphic advertising an International Women's Day Event hosted in Guatemala

Cecilia says the university has played an important role to help the GDG chapter achieve its goal of more visibility and reaching a broader audience. Furthermore, Celicila recognized that Evelyn Cruz, lead of the Engineering Education Group at Galileo University, has been instrumental during the planning process.

Looking ahead to new opportunities

“I think it is important to create moments and spaces where we can celebrate and spotlight all the amazing things women are doing,” says Cecilia. “By being part of a bigger network like GDG, we also get to know and learn from talented women from all over Latin America and the world.

Woman in white shirt with long straight hair standing and smiling with a giant Android logo robot

“The GDG community offers a very diverse group of people, and I think this diversity of countries, companies, and expertise adds value for anyone who is involved in these communities.”

Developing those initial Android skills has paid off, as Castillo now serves as a co-organizer for Google Developer Group (GDG) in Guatemala, holds a position as a Women Techmakers ambassador, and works as a Senior Mobile Engineer at PayPal. In this role she works on both Android and iOS platforms and she’s now giving back to the community in so many ways.

Learn more about Google Developer Groups and how to join or start one near you here.

DevFest hits ten year milestone and hosts diverse developers worldwide

Posted by Komal Sandhu - Global Program Manager, Google Developer Groups

A mosaic of DevFest attendees from around the world
A mosaic of DevFest attendees from around the world

DevFest: bringing community, connection, and technical content into focus

What might a flower pressing workshop, a keynote speech from a sitting Minister of Science & Technology, and a dinner at a 144-year-old restaurant in Madrid all have in common? These distinctive hyper-local experiences reveal just a few of the ways developers from all walks came together to master technical topics this year at community-led DevFest events around the world.

DevFest represents the largest distributed tech conference in the world, and the global community-led initiative made a point to include all developers. In its tenth year, DevFest 2021 celebrated using technology for good, and pioneered programs to nurture local economic growth.

Making developer-driven content approachable

Google Developer Groups (GDG) chapters in regions around the world curated events and agendas to suit the needs and interests of local developer communities worldwide. Organizers offered hands-on demos, workshops, and codelabs about the latest developer technologies, including Android, Google Cloud Platform, Web.dev, Firebase, Google Assistant, Flutter and Machine Learning with TensorFlow, . Events also feature talks and sessions that covered emerging topics and how to build experience in the industry.

Communities gathered both in-person and in virtual settings to make technical content accessible for developers. As more developers joined in on the fun, some contributed to Dev Library, a showcase of open-source projects built by community members that feature Google technologies.Some events provide mentorship and career support to early-career developers. Many organizers made diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and youth skills development a central focus of their gatherings.

DevFests around the world: a patchwork of both spoken and programming languages

DevFests bridge multiple languages, developer skill levels, and regions, and each individual event can address local challenges and opportunities.

Picture of a bunch of people in a classroom. On the board in front of them is a projected slide that reads Natural Language Processing
A DevFest session covering Natural Language Processing in the remote area of Norilsk

The Russian city of Norilsk, for example, located above the Polar Circle, usually takes at least five hours to fly to from most places in the area. Developers in this remote region hosted DevFest as part of a weekend long IT summit. Here, Google Developer Experts from Russia, Belarus, and Norway gave talks attended from IT specialists, teachers, high school students, and representatives from city organizations. “The event is significant for Norilsk,” said GDG Norilsk member Maxim. “Finally, we are holding specialized conferences for IT specialists who are cut off from the mainland.”

Large group photo shows the attendees of DevFest 2021 Islamabad
Attendees of DevFest 2021 Islamabad

Take the largest DevFest in Pakistan to date, organized by GDG Islamabad, where organizers and guest speakers shared plans to teach young people skills like Android development, machine learning, and web technologies to infuse technical skills into Pakistan’s economy. Shibli Faraz, celebrated Minister of Science & Technology of Pakistan, remarked that young people contribute technical knowledge to the country.​​ The event also featured women’s online safety training sessions, organized in partnership with Women Techmakers.

Creating inclusive spaces around the globe:

GDG Algeciras in Spain collaborated with the Besana Down Syndrome Association and brought kids together to learn about Google Classroom, Meet, and Maps. GDG Lille introduced live captioning to make their event as accessible as possible for people with hearing impairments. GDG Lleida hosted a morning of tech talks and an afternoon of in-person talks centered around Lleida’s identity as the second-largest fruit growing region in Spain, including a flower-pressing workshop. “The afternoon track was a blast, with all the attendees expressing their thanks for the event and the workshops. Everyone said they felt appreciated and included,” writes GDG Spain organizer Andreu Ibáñez. [Watch: DevFest Lleida Afternoon Events]

From DevFest events in India, China, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, North America, and beyond, developers came together at DevFests across locales and chapters for inspirational talks and technical content and career sessions. In some regions where gatherings were permitted, many attendees noted DevFest remained the first in-person event they’d attended in years, bringing excitement packed with learning, networking, experimenting, and swag (and a reinvigorated sense of community).

Learning together through cross-cultural conversations & coding events

Marking the tenth year of the program, DevFest 2021 culminated as a unifying global initiative, which saw 450+ events in 90+ countries and helped 500k+ developers.

“This year, I thought it was especially important to feature not only technology, but also participants’ feelings and emotions,” writes Andreu Ibáñez, an organizer in Spain that planned three distinct DevFests “After all, community is so much more than just a bunch of tech aficionados.”

The spirit of DevFest has always come from the people involved - developers from all different backgrounds and skill levels. Countries bring their own flavor and spin to their programs, and many organizers offered innovative ways for participants to connect. The event series continues to inspire local developer communities to plug in and share learning resources.

Google Developer Group Spotlight: A conversation with software developer Aditi Soni

Posted by Manoranjan Padhy - Developer Relations Lead, India

Six years ago, Aditi Soni was new to computers and programming when she learned about Google Developer Groups (GDG) and Women Techmakers (WTM) from a senior at her university, the Shri Vaishnav Institute of Technology and Science, Indore. Then, everything changed when she joined a Google Developer Group in Indore, the largest city in Central India, which began as a 16th century trading hub.

“Initially, it was extremely overwhelming for me to be in that space, where so many accomplished professionals were present,” Aditi says of her first experiences attending GDG Indore. “I was very hesitant to go and have a conversation with them.”

But Aditi felt determined. Her friend Aditya Sharma taught her C and C++, and she practiced her programming skills on her smartphone, using tools like the C4droid Android app, because she didn’t have a laptop. By the time she got a laptop, she was off and running. Aditi began teaching herself Android development and landed an internship after her second year of college.

image of Aditi standing at a podium

“I consider myself as an opportunity grabber,” Aditi writes in a post on her Medium blog. “ I never miss a single chance to become a better version of myself. I used to attend all community meetups and did not miss a single one.”

All her hard work paid off. In 2017, she became a Women Techmakers lead in Indore and took her first flight on an airplane to the WTM Leads Summit in Bangalore. The same year, she became a Microsoft Student Partner and attended Google Developer Days India. In 2018, Aditi earned the Google India Udacity Android Developers Nanodegree Scholarship, as one of the top 150 students from India, and graduated with a Bachelor’s of Engineering degree in computer science. In 2019, Women Techmakers awarded Aditi a travel grant to Madrid, Spain to attend the Firebase Summit.

image Aditi at Firebase Summit 2019

Using the experience of being a woman in tech to encourage others to pursue STEM careers

Now, Aditi is a full-time software developer at Consultadd Incorporation, India, and a Women Techmakers Ambassador, and a GDG organizer for her local chapter in Pune. She contributes to the community as an organizer, speaker, and mentor.

“We organize monthly technical meetups to empower women and provide them with a platform to achieve their goals,” Aditi explains. “Being able to help others feels like I am giving it back to the community.”

Aditi says GDG and WTM have helped her develop technical skills and have also positively impacted her personal life.

“I had significant life experiences because of the Google Developer Group and Women Techmakers communities, including my first flight, my first hands-on experience with Google's trending technologies, and one-on-one interaction with Googlers and many great personalities while attending global summits,” she says. “All these things have helped me to be a person who can guide and help others and share my knowledge and experiences with hundreds of professionals today.”

Aditi describes herself as a community enthusiast, using her platform to encourage other women and students to pursue careers in technology, even if they’re brand-new to the field. She also enjoys mentoring new programmers.

“I am passionate about making an impact on others’ lives by sharing my journey and experiences and helping people face hurdles like mine with courage and confidence,” she says. “I enjoy helping people who are struggling to learn to code or who want to switch their careers to tech.”

image of Aditi presenting in a classroom

Supporting budding developers

Aditi acknowledges the adage, “Change is not easy,’’ especially when preparing for a career in technology.

“You may try very hard, give up so many times, and go through all that frustration, but remember not to quit,” she advises. “The moment you feel like quitting is the moment you need to keep pushing and get your reward.”

She has specific suggestions for making it easier to build new tech skills, too.

“Before learning a specific technology, understand yourself,” she suggests. “What works for you? What's your learning process? Then look for the appropriate resources. It can be a simple one-page tutorial or a full-fledged course. Everything is easy when the basics are clear and the foundation is strong.”

Aditi plans to continue contributing to the tech community in India and around the world, by sharing her insight, connecting with new people, and developing new technical skills. She recently welcomed a new member into her family–a baby girl–and she is growing her own regional tech community and providing so much to others in her area and the STEM field.

Know someone with a powerful story? Nominate someone in your community to be featured, or share your own personal stories with us through the story submission form!

Growing as a Technologist in Shanghai with Google Developer Groups

Posted by Brian Shen, Regional Lead for Mainland China Developer Communities

Banner image shows a photo of Ning Zhang, member of GDG Shanghai. There is also a photo of the GDG Shanghai banner. Text reads Growing as a Technologist in Shanghai with Google Developer Groups

Every developer’s path to pursuing a career in tech can be traced back to a single moment. Such is the case for Ning Zhang, a developer from China, who found his early interest in web development as a high schooler at the age of fifteen. Ning built his first website for his English class to help his classmates succeed with their studies. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he was only just getting started. Throughout high school, he played with Google Webmaster Tools (now Google Search Console) and Google Adsense to create and manage numerous other websites for fun. Like so many aspiring developers before him, Ning knew he’d found his passion, but the path ahead remained unclear.

Enter Google Developer Groups

To grow his skills further and turn his hobby into a viable career path, Ning majored in data science at university in Qingdao. Here, he participated in data-modeling competitions like Kaggle Days, and other events that gave him more exposure to the tech community and allowed him to learn from his peers. It’s also where he first heard about Google Developer Groups (GDGs) and their many opportunities for learning, networking and collaboration.

It was perfect timing too. After graduation Ning got a job with a financial services firm in Shanghai, home to a very active GDG. He jumped at the chance to engage in activities and workshops to further his abilities and knowledge, especially in data science, which constitutes a significant part of his work responsibilities.

Image of Ning Zhang, member of GDG Shanghai. He is standing in a crowd with a microphone, asking a question

While Ning enjoys the formal learning opportunities the GDG offers, he finds the sense of community and support—the opportunity to learn from others and share his expertise as well – even more valuable.

“This kind of atmosphere is actually more inspiring than learning a new technology, new programming ideas, and new algorithms.”

“Everyone has different hands-on experience and expertise in different companies,” Ning explains. “GDG provides an environment where people can share their experience and listen to each other.”

The combination of community, developer success, and social impact has made a huge impression on him both personally and professionally. The international nature of GDGs also provides an expanded perspective and different ways of thinking about problems and solutions. “GDG really gave me a lot of new and fresh information and opened our eyes to more global approaches,” says Ning.

Statistics illustrating the low number of women in computing occupations

Group photo of GDG Shanghai Activity Center

Tapping into a global community

As the importance of technology continues to grow, the GDG community can play an even greater role by helping people learn valuable tech skills, supporting the dissemination of knowledge, and spurring innovation. Offerings that focus on sharing knowledge and other events can assist members in achieving their career goals as they have done for Ning. “I hope every member of GDG will experience the good atmosphere of the group in the future so that their value can be magnified,” says Zhang.

Join the community: Learn how you can find a GDG chapter near you.