Category Archives: Google Developers Blog

News and insights on Google platforms, tools and events

How to be more productive as a developer: 5 app integrations for Google Chat that can help

Posted by Mario Tapia, Product Marketing Manager, Google Workspace

In today's fast-paced and ever-changing world, it is more important than ever for developers to be able to work quickly and efficiently. With so many different tools and applications available, it can be difficult to know which ones will help you be the most productive. In this blog post, we will discuss five different DevOps application integrations for Google Chat that can help you improve your workflows and be more productive as a developer.

PagerDuty for Google Chat

PagerDuty helps automate, orchestrate, and accelerate responses to unplanned work across an organization. PagerDuty for Google Chat empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations, and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for an exceptional customer experience—all from Google Chat. With PagerDuty for Google Chat, get notifications, see and share details with link previews, and act by creating or updating incidents.

How to: Use PagerDuty for Google Chat

Asana for Google Chat

Asana helps you manage projects, focus on what’s important, and organize work in one place for seamless collaboration. With Asana for Google Chat, you can easily create tasks, get notifications, update tasks, assign them to the right people, and track your progress.

How to: Use Asana for Google Chat

Jira

Jira makes it easy to manage your issues and bugs. With Jira for Google Chat, you can receive notifications, easily create issues, assign them to the right people, and track your progress while keeping everyone in the loop.

How to: Use Jira for Google Chat

Jenkins

Jenkins allows you to automate your builds and deployments. With Jenkins for Google Chat, development and operations teams can connect into their Jenkins pipeline and stay up to date by receiving software build notifications or trigger a build directly in Google Chat.

How to: Use Jenkins for Google Chat

GitHub

GitHub lets you manage your code and collaborate with your team. Integrations like GitHub for Google Chat make the entire development process fit easily into a developer’s workflow. With GitHub, teams can quickly push new commits, make pull requests, do code reviews, and provide real-time feedback that improves the quality of their code—all from Google Chat.

How to: Use GitHub for Google Chat

Next steps

These are just a few of the many different application integrations that can help you be more productive as a developer, check out the Google Workspace Marketplace for more integrations you or the team might already be using. By using the right tools and applications, you can easily stay connected with your team, manage your tasks and projects, and automate your builds and deployments.

To keep track of all the latest announcements and developer updates for Google Workspace please subscribe to our monthly newsletter or follow us @workspacedevs.

Source: Google Developers Blog

#WeArePlay | Meet Ania from Canada. More stories from USA, Australia and Montenegro

Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing

This International Women’s Day, we’re dedicating our latest #WeArePlay stories to the inspirational women founders creating apps and games businesses on Google Play. Like Ania from Victoria in Canada, who is making mental health support more accessible worldwide.

When Ania was a student, she started experiencing debilitating panic attacks. Realizing there wasn’t much help readily available on mobile, she took it upon herself to do her own research and learn how to manage her anxiety. After feeling more confident again, she wanted to share what she had learned and help people, so began developing Rootd.

The app provides in-the-moment relief: with lessons to understand panic attacks, breathing exercises, and ways to make short-term and long-term changes to reduce anxiety. She is growing the app’s reach by expanding to different countries, with the hope it will eventually become one of the most widely used tools to overcome panic attacks in the world.

Celebrating more women founders

Alongside Ania, there are many other women founders doing incredible work in the apps and games space: like Bria from USA - founder of Honey B Games and creator of bubble tea game Boba Story, Lauren and Christina from Australia - co-founders of Lumi Interactive and their wellbeing app Kinder World: Cozy Plants, and Jelena from Montenegro - CEO of games studio 3Hills.

Check out their stories now at g.co/play/weareplay.

How useful did you find this blog post?

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Source: Google Developers Blog

Let’s go. It’s Google I/O 2023

Posted by Jeanine Banks, VP & General Manager, Developer X, and Head of Developer Relations

Google I/O is back and you’re invited to join us online May 10! Learn about Google’s latest solutions, products, and technologies for developers, that help unlock your creativity and simplify your development workflow. You’ll also get to hear about ways to use the latest in technology, from AI and cloud, to mobile and web. Tune in to watch the live streamed keynotes from Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA, then dive into 100+ on-demand technical sessions and engage with helpful learning material. Visit the Google I/O site and register to stay informed about I/O and other related events coming soon.

Want to get a head start?

Register at the Google I/O website to receive event updates
Join one of Google’s developer community groups in a city near you
Create a Google developer profile to get I/O content recommendations

Stay tuned for more updates. We look forward to seeing you in May!

Source: Google Developers Blog

Google Dev Library Letters: 19th Edition

Posted by the Dev Library team

In this newsletter, we’re highlighting the best projects developed with Google technologies that have been contributed to the Google Dev Library platform. We hope this will spark some inspiration for your next project!

Contributions of the Month

[ML] Serving Stable Diffusion by Chansung Park

Learn the various ways to deploy Stable Diffusion with TensorFlow Serving, Hugging Face Endpoint, and FastAPI.

Read more on DevLibrary

[ML] Textual inversion pipeline for Stable Diffusion by Chansung Park

Dive into this repository which demonstrates how to manage multiple models and their prototype applications of fine-tuned Stable Diffusion on new concepts by Textual Inversion.

Read more on DevLibrary

[Flutter] Animated soccer rating hexagon by Prateek Sharma

Create a hexagon widget in Flutter that displays the ratings of a soccer player or team. The six sides represent a different aspect of the player or team's rating such as speed, strength, and accuracy.

Read more on DevLibrary

Android & Kotlin

Mastering Kotlin Coroutines by Amit Shekhar

Dive into an introduction to coroutines in Kotlin programming language. Coroutines are a way to write asynchronous and non-blocking code in a sequential and easy-to-understand manner.

Kotlin Symbol Processing (KSP) for code generation by Tim Lin

Discover more about KSP API you can use to develop lightweight compiler plugins, which helps you get the complete source code information during compile time.

Form Conductor by Naing Aung Luu

Learn about form conductor. More than form validation, it provides a handful of reusable API to construct a form in simple easy steps.

MovieDB by Gabriel Bronzatti Moro

Discover how to fetch data from Movie DB API and allow users to search for movies and view details and store them on a local database in this Android project.

Angular

A complete guide to Angular Multilingual Application by Hossein Mousavi

Dive into the technical aspects of building a multilingual Angular application, starting with the localization of the application's text.

Flutter

Bank cards UI by Ethiel Adiassa

See how Flutter can be used to create aesthetically pleasing and functional UI designs for banking applications.

macOS UI by Reuben Turner

Dive into the repo resource for designers and developers looking to create beautiful templates and tutorials to create macOS applications and interfaces.

Google Cloud

Search for Brazilian laws using Dialogflow CX and matching engine by Rubens Zimbres

Develop a chatbot using Dialogflow CX and a matching engine to help users search for something specific in legislation.

Awesome CloudOps automation by Doug Sillars

Learn how a single repository could satisfy all your day-to-day CloudOps automation needs.

Serverless Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform by Gursimar Singh

Learn how serverless technologies like Cloud Run can be used to simplify and expedite the process of designing software applications.

Implement secure CI/CD with Workload Identity Federation, GitLab CI, and Cloud Deploy by Ezekias Bokove

See how to implement a secure Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline using Workload Identity Federation and GitLab CI.

Browse Dev Library | Newsletter archive

Source: Google Developers Blog

Developer Journey – Women’s History Month: March 2023

Posted by Lyanne Alfaro, DevRel Program Manager, Google Developer Studio

In honor of Women’s History Month, it’s our pleasure to feature members across the Women Techmakers ecosystem for March’s Developer Journey profiles. These are community leaders who have explored, navigated and built using Google tools. They are active members of the broader Google Developers community.

In March, the WTM program will also celebrate International Women’s Day, centered on the theme “Dare To Be,” celebrating the courage and strength that this community demonstrates, made of thought leaders who are creating a world where women can thrive in tech. You can find more about the Women Techmakers program during IWD here.

Ezinne Osuamadi

Women Techmakers Mentor and Ambassador
Waldorf, Germany (A proud Nigerian!)
Software Developer/ Technical Product Manager
Twitter
Linkedln
Instagram

What Google tools have you used to build?

Android Studio, Firebase, Google Play Services, Google Analytics. I'm a mobile developer and recently started getting my hands on technical product management and agile product owner. The tools I use for development are Android as the framework and Android Studio as the integrated development environment.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

I would say Flutter. The Flutter toolkit has a layered architecture that allows for full customization. The fact that Flutter comes with fully-customizable widgets allows you to build native interfaces in minutes. I also love the fact that some of these widgets’ features like scrolling, navigation, icons, and fonts provide a full native performance on both iOS and Android. Flutter is one code base and it makes building mobile applications much easier. I don't have to build a separate app for Android, and another separate app for IOS. Another Flutter feature I like so much is the “hot reload.” It allows me to easily build UIs, add new features, and fix bugs faster. It also allows easy compilation of Flutter code to native ARM machine code using Dart native compilers.

Please share with us about something you’ve built in the past using Google tools.

The first app I built was for one of my former employers. It happened almost three years ago, and it was the first project I worked on when I started learning Flutter. I was super excited about it. It was a timesheet app targeted specifically for employees. The sole purpose of the app is for employees to be able to schedule tasks and also give a time slot to each task.

What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?

From my experience running an NGO called Ladies Crushing IT Africa and organizing a couple of tech events, I would say this: Don’t go into software development if you are not passionate or interested in it. Going into development because you think they pay developers well or because your friends are earning money from it is a wrong reason to start your development journey. A tech career journey should be about what you want to be in the future. Does it align with your future goals and objectives? How or what are strategies in achieving that path? Also note that the path to becoming a successful developer is a process. It is not all roses, and there are times when debugging will make it look difficult. But you should be resilient and diligent in making the most out of it when you encounter difficulties. It is always about continuous improvement. Never stop learning to keep yourself up to date with latest technologies and development tools.

Patty O’Callaghan

GDG Glasgow and Women Techmakers Ambassador
Glasgow, Scotland
Tech Lead @ Charles River Laboratories
Twitter
Linkedln

What Google tools have you used to build?

I use the Chrome DevTools daily. I find them very helpful. I also enjoy working on projects using TensorFlow.JS and Firebase.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

I would have to say TensorFlow.JS and its pre-made models are my favorite. I enjoy the fact that I can build cool machine learning projects directly in the browser. Even developers unfamiliar with this technology can quickly build, train, and deploy machine learning models using just a few lines of code. Some kids at my code club have used TensorFlow.JS for amazing projects, like building class attendance applications using facial recognition, or a site that checks correct form while practicing karate at home, and another for studying with the help of an AI agent.

Please share with us about something you’ve built in the past using Google tools.

I've worked on several side-projects using TensorFlow.JS for my workshops. One of my favorites is an emotion recognition app, using the Teachable Machine. Additionally, for work, I used TF.JS to develop a machine learning solution that suggests taxonomies for articles based on their content. It analyzes over 30 taxonomies to find the best match for the given article.

What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?

First of all, focus on learning the fundamentals of programming. A strong foundation will benefit you in the long run. Practice coding regularly and find a mentor or a community to help you along the way. For example, contributing to an open-source project is an excellent way to learn. And remember: Making mistakes is a natural part of the learning process, so don't get discouraged if you encounter difficulties. Keep pushing forward!

Alexis & David Snelling

Alexis – Women Techmakers Ambassador & Lead
Named as Top 10 Women founders to Watch in 2023 by Forbes Group
San Francisco, CA
CEO WeTransact.live
Twitter
Linkedln
Facebook

David – Google Developer Groups
San Francisco, CA
CTO WeTransact.live
Twitter
Linkedln
Facebook

What Google tools have you used to build?

Here’s just a few of the tools we’ve used:

Angular 15
Material Design
Google Cloud / Firebase
Authentication
Hosting
Firestore
Functions
Extensions
Storage
Machine Learning
PWA Standards
Chrome / DevTools
Android

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

Firestore has been our favorite due to its scalability and real-time data capabilities, through websockets and triggers, the data flexibility, plus query capabilities. This is how we’ve built out our modern event-driven architecture to allow for a completely real-time application providing immediate data and collaboration across our entire white label application suite.

Please share with us about something you’ve built in the past using Google tools.

We built the WeTransact Innovation Platform: From Idea to ROI which offers a learning-based distributed social platform for learning, collaborating and presenting yourself and your innovations.

For customers, we’ve created a White Label SaaS Platform, licensed by universities, incubators, developer groups and any program looking to provide education, collaboration, and AI assisted auto generated presentation and communication tools. Our platform combines features similar to LinkedIn, Coursera, AngelList and Zoom in one simple and modern unified platform for communities to make collaboration & lifelong learning globally accessible to everyone. The WeTransact platform accelerates & scales your program’s impact to solve the world's biggest problems better together.

Here’s just a few other ways we’ve used Google tools:

What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?

There’s a few pieces of advice we’d offer! Among them is to start early. Find a friend who is already developing or shares your passion. Find an open source project that inspires you or represents something you're passionate about. Dig in, change stuff, break stuff and then learn why. Search is your best friend – use it to always question and reset your assumptions, learn new approaches, and practice not getting stuck in a “boilerplate” or “standard” solution to each problem. It’s not about memorizing – technology changes every day and you should too. Finally, know that it’s about the process and the journey, not the destination.

Source: Google Developers Blog

Celebrate Google’s Coding Competitions with a final round of programming fun

Google’s Coding Competitions at g/co.codingcompetitions.

After 20 years, Google's Coding Competitions come to a close with a final round.

By: The Coding Competitions Team

Remember 2003? Before Chrome, Google Calendar, Android, and YouTube? When we carefully cleaned up our saved emails because GMail and its gigabyte of storage hadn't arrived? Two decades ago – Google launched a global coding competition called Code Jam, which challenged programmers of all levels to test and hone their skills by racing to solve algorithmic problems.

From there, our coding competition lineup continued to grow. Kick Start began as a contest for recent graduates in China and quickly spread around the world. Hash Code, Google's first team-based challenge, started in Europe. And a first-in-class Distributed Code Jam asked participants to build solutions that could scale when run on multiple machines.

Throughout our coding competitions' 20-year history, you've generated billions of lines of code across millions of submissions. You've gone through hundreds of rounds for thousands of problems and put in millions of hours of code execution and testing. Over a million of you from almost every country worldwide have participated — from experienced programmers to students and everyone in between. And now, just as we invited you to our very first round in 2003, we're asking you to join us for one final event as the competitions come to an end.

Join us on Saturday, April 15, 2023 at 2 p.m. UTC as we host four simultaneous online rounds of competition at varying levels of difficulty. Register now to get in on the action.

And to those who've taken part over the years: It's been an honor to learn, succeed, fail, and have fun coding with you. Through the conceptual art, the slides, the gophers, and the absurd number of pancakes, we did it – and we did it together. Thanks for going on this journey with us.

Source: Google Developers Blog

Google Dev Library Letters: 18th Edition

Posted by the Dev Library Team

Contributions of the month

[Android] SSImagePicker by Simform

See how to use a lightweight and easy-to-use image picker library that has features like cropping, compression and rotation, video, and Live Photos support.

Read more on DevLibrary

Moving image showing overview of coroutines

[Kotlin] Mastering Coroutines in Kotlin by Reyhaneh Ezatpanah

Dive into a comprehensive overview of coroutines including tips and best practices, along with a detailed explanation of the different types of coroutines available in Kotlin and how to use them effectively.

Read more on DevLibrary

Flow Chart demonstrating Image to Image stable diffusion in Flax

[Machine Learning] Image2Image with Stable Diffusion in Flax by Bachir Chihani

Learn the uses of the Diffusion method, a technique used to improve the stability and performance of image-to-image translation models.

Read more on DevLibrary

Android

Jetpack Compose state, deconstructed by Yves Kalume

Learn how state management in Jetpack Compose is implemented, how it can be used to build a responsive and dynamic UI, and how it compares to other solutions in Android development.

Dynamic environment switching on Android by Ashwini Kumar

Find out how to switch between different environments (such as development, staging, and production) in an Android app.

Migration to Jetpack Compose for a legacy application by Abhishek Saxena

Migrate an existing legacy Android application to Jetpack Compose, a modern UI toolkit for building native Android apps

Machine Learning

Simple diffusion in TensorFlow by Bachir Chihani

Understand the benefits of using TensorFlow for image processing, including the ability to easily parallelize computations and utilize GPUs for faster processing.

Deep dive into stable diffusion by Bachir Chihani

Look into the Flax implementation of the Stable Diffusion model to better understand how it works.

Create-tf-app by Radi Cho

See the tool that allows you to quickly create a TensorFlow application by generating the necessary code and file structure.

Angular

NGX-Valdemort by Cédric Exbrayat

Dive into a set of pre-built validation rules and error messages for commonly encountered use cases, making it easy to quickly implement robust form validation for your application.

Passing configuration dynamically from one module to another using ModuleWithProviders by Madhusuthanan B

Learn how to pass configuration data dynamically between modules in an Angular application.

Flutter

Mastering Dart & Flutter DevTools by Ashita Prasad

Look at the first part of the series aimed at helping developers to understand how to use the tools effectively to build applications with Dart and Flutter.

Server-driven UI in Flutter - an experiment on remote widgets by Akshat Vinaybhai Patel

Learn the insights, code snippets and results of the experiment for readers to better understand the concept of Server-Driven UI and its potential in Flutter app development.

Flutter Photo Manager by Alex Li

Learn an easy-to-use API for accessing the device's photo library, that performs operations like retrieving images, videos, and albums, as well as deleting, creating, and updating files in the photo library.

Firebase

How to authenticate to Firebase using email and password in Jetpack Compose? By Alex Mamo

Here’s a simple solution for implementing Firebase Authentication with email and password, using a clean architecture with Jetpack Compose on Android.

Google Cloud

Google Firestore Data Source plugin for Grafana by Prasanna Kumar

Learn how it allows users to perform operations like querying, aggregating, and visualizing data from Firestore, making it a powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing real-time data in a variety of applications. The repository provides the source code for the plugin and documentation on how to install and use it with Grafana.

Cluster cloner by Joshua Fox

See how this project aims to replicate clusters across different cloud environments and examine these varying infrastructure models.

Getting to know Cloud Firestore by Mustapha Adekunle

Learn how this post covers the basic features and benefits of Cloud Firestore, and how this document database is a scalable and versatile NoSQL cloud database.

Google’s Mandar Chaphalkar has submitted Data Governance with Dataplex

Discover how Dataplex can be used to transform data to meet specific business requirements, and how it can integrate with other Google Cloud services like BigQuery for efficient data storage and analysis.

Browse Dev Library | Newsletter archive

Source: Google Developers Blog

ML Olympiad 2023: Globally Distributed ML Competitions by Google ML Community

Posted by Hee Jung, DevRel Community Manager

What is the ML Olympiad?

The ML Olympiad is an associated Kaggle Community Competitions hosted by ML GDE, TFUG, 3rd-party ML communities, supported by Google Developers. The ML Developer Programs team and the communities successfully ran the first round of the campaign in 2022 and are now launching the second round. The goal of this campaign is to provide ML training opportunities for developers by leveraging Kaggle’s features.

ML Olympiad Community Competitions

17 ML Olympiad community competitions are currently open. Visit the ML Olympiad page to participate.

Into the Space

Predicting which spaceship passengers were transported by the anomaly using records recovered from the spaceship’s damaged computer system.
Host: MD Shahriyar Al Mustakim Mitul / TFUG Dhaka

Water Quality Prediction

Estimating the quality of water.
Hosts: Usha Rengaraju, Vijayabharathi Karuppasamy (TFUG Chennai), Samuel T (TFUG Mysuru)

Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Predicting medical diagnosis [breast cancer].
Host: Ankit Kumar Verma / TFUG Prayagraj

Book Recommendations

To provide personalized recommendations to users based on their reading history and preferences using various machine learning algorithms.
Hosts: Anushka Raj, Yugandhar Surya / TFUG Hajipur

Argania Tree Deforestation Detection

Use Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to detect and map areas of deforestation in the Argania region.
Hosts: Taha Bouhsine / TFUG Agadir

Multilingual Spell Correction

Reconstruct noisy sentences in European languages: English, French, German, Bulgarian and Turkish.
Host: Radostin Cholakov (ML GDE)

CO2 Emissions Forecasting

Forecasting CO2 emissions based on deforestation in Côte d'Ivoire.
Hosts: Armel Yara, Kimana Misago, Jordan Erifried / TFUG Abidjan

Ensure Healthy Lives (in local language)

Use ML techniques to help achieve common good health and well-being.
Hosts: Vinicius Fernandes Caridá (ML GDE), Pedro Gengo, Alex Fernandes Mansano / TFUG São Paulo

Predictive Maintenance

Predict future engine’s failures.
Host: Daniel Pereda / TFUG Santiago

Firetrucks Are Red And Cars Are Blue

To create a model that can accurately predict the correct class for each image, without overfitting.
Host: Prasoon Kottarathil / TFUG Thrissur

Dialect Recognition (in Arabic)

Dialect recognition in order to improve user experience in AI applications.
Hosts: Ruqiya Bin Safi (ML GDE), Eyad Sibai, Hussain Alfayez / Saudi TFUG & Applied ML/AI group

Sentiment Analysis Of JUMIA Tunisia (in local language)

Use JUMIA customer reviews to determine the sentiment of content from text data.
Host: Boulbaba BEN AMMAR / TFUG Sfax

Kolkata Housing Prediction

Kolkata housing prediction results can be used to address related social and economic issues.
Host: Rishiraj Acharya / TFUG Kolkata

Can You Guess The Beer Style?

This is a machine learning competition focused on classifying beer into 17 distinct styles based on key descriptors.
Host: Marvik

Detect ChatGpt answers

The goal of this competition is to classify ChatGpt answers vs real human answers for a variety of questions.
Host: Elyes Manai (ML GDE) / IEEE ESSTHS + GDSC ISETSO + PyData Tunisia

MLAct Pose Detection

Raising awareness about some basic yoga poses, and encouraging our community members to practice the basic parts of computer vision.
Host: Imen Masmoudi / MLAct ML Community

Hausa Sentiment Analysis 2.0 (in local language)

Classify the sentiment of sentences of Hausa Language.
Hosts: Nuruddeen Sambo, Dattijo Murtala Makama / TFUG Bauchi

Navigating ML Olympiad

You can search “ML Olympiad” on Kaggle Community Competitions page to see them all. And for further info, look for #MLOlympiad on social media.

Google Developers supports the hosts of each competition. Browse through the available competitions and participate in those that interest you!

Source: Google Developers Blog

Meet our newest Accelerator: Climate Change cohort

Posted by Matt Ridenour, Head of Startup Developer Ecosystem - USA

Scaling high potential startups aimed at tackling climate change can have an immensely positive impact for our planet.

In line with Google’s broader commitment to address climate change, we are proud to announce the third cohort for our Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change program. This 10-week digital accelerator brings the best of Google’s people, products and programming to help take early-stage North American climate tech startups to the next level.

Meet the 12 exceptional startups using cloud technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning and more for a healthier planet.

Agrology, Alexandria, VA

Agrology's predictive agriculture platform helps farmers grow with confidence and beat climate change through data, insights and soil monitoring at scale.

BattGenie, Seattle, WA

BattGenie provides Li-ion battery management software and solutions, enabling safe, fast charging while improving battery life cycle.

Bodhi, Austin, TX

Bodhi empowers solar companies to deliver amazing customer experiences, automating communications so installers can focus on increasing renewable energy access.

Cambio, San Francisco, CA

Cambio is software that helps commercial real estate companies and their corporate tenants decarbonize their buildings.

Cleartrace, Austin, TX

Cleartrace is disrupting legacy reporting with a new standard for how energy and decarbonization information is collected, stored, accessed and transacted.

ElectricFish, Fremont, CA

ElectricFish builds and deploys resilient, flexible EV infrastructure to accelerate decarbonization and support community climate adaptation.

Enersion, Toronto, ON

Enersion offers zero-emission solar trigeneration energy that converts solar radiation into refrigerant-free cooling, heating and electricity.

Eugenie AI, Cupertino, CA

Eugenie is an AI intelligence platform for asset-heavy manufacturers to track, trace, and reduce emissions while improving operations.

Finch, Denver, CO

Finch is a platform that decodes products' environmental footprints to help consumers and shares insights with businesses.

Refiberd, Cupertino, CA

Refiberd is tackling the 186 billion pound global textile waste problem with the first AI-empowered circular textile sorting and reclamation system.

Sesame Solar, Jackson, MI

Sesame Solar is decarbonizing disaster response with rapidly deployable mobile Nanogrids with essential services, providing continuous power from 100% renewable energy.

Voltpost, New York City, NY

Voltpost decarbonizes mobility and democratizes charging access by retrofitting lamp posts into modular electric vehicle charging stations.

These companies will join the other 22 startups from across North America who have participated in the accelerator (see program alumni).

In addition to mentorship and technical project support, the 10-week program will focus on product design, customer acquisition, and leadership development, granting startups access to an expansive network of mentors, senior executives, and industry leaders. All Google for Startups Accelerators are equity-free, so selected companies don’t have to offer anything to participate.

We are honored to partner with this cohort of companies through this accelerator and beyond, to advance their technologies and protect our planet.

The program kicks off on Tuesday, March 7 and concludes with a virtual Demo Day on May 11. Stay tuned and join us in celebrating these exceptional startups.

Source: Google Developers Blog

Developer Journey: February 2023

Posted by Lyanne Alfaro, DevRel Program Manager, Google Developer Studio

Developer Journey is a monthly series to spotlight diverse and global developers sharing relatable challenges, opportunities, and wins in their journey. Every month, we will spotlight developers around the world, the Google tools they leverage, and the kind of products they are building.

This month, it’s our pleasure to feature three members spanning communities, including Women Techmakers, Google Developer Experts and Google Developer Groups. Enjoy reading through their entries below and be on the lookout on social media platforms, where we will also showcase their work.

Deepa Subramanian

Google Developer Group, Women Techmakers
Road to GDS Candidate, Web Technologies
Freelance Software Engineer
Find me on: LinkedIn

What Google tools have you used to build?

I am a frontend engineer, having used Angular framework for building single page applications, and using Chrome dev tools, like Puppeteer, Lighthouse, and more. I have also built progressive web app projects using project Fugu API’s to add to homescreen, badging, file share API etc. I am excited to see more API’s in the future.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

I enjoy using Firebase for authentication and realtime database as it makes my life easier as a frontend engineer.

Please share with us about something you’ve built in the past using Google tools.

In the past, I have built small applications using Android and Java. My first Google tool that I used was Android studio where I built small Android applications using Java (this was back in 2017). Then, I moved to the web. Currently, I am also using the Flutter web platform.

What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?

If you are a beginner, start building small projects. You will need to be consistently learning. I would urge everyone to join a developer community like GDG. It helps you grow and network with other developers.

Burcu Geneci

Former Women Techmakers Ambassador
Co-Founder & CTO at Monday Hero, Inc.
San Francisco, CA
Find me on: LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter

What Google tools have you used to build?

As a CTO and technical founder, I’ve used various Google Cloud services, including Cloud Run, Cloud Build, Cloud Storage, Google Maps Geocoding API, Kubernetes Engine, and Secret Manager.

At my startup Monday Hero, we’re building a solution that converts Figma design to code and generates Flutter widgets from design. I’m using Google tools related to Flutter almost every day. Dartpad.dev is always open and pinned on my browser. I find Flutter docs very clear and concise.

I also usually explore other Google tools in personal projects. For example, I’ve used ML Kit and Firebase for one of my hobby projects to recognize texts in images.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

My favorite tool so far is Google's open-source framework Flutter. It's very straightforward to create mobile, web, and desktop applications from a single codebase. The coolest part of Flutter is that applications written on Flutter are natively compiled. Creating natively working applications is very important for user experience. Before using Flutter, I built applications for both iOS and Android natively, but being able to build a mobile application for both platforms at least 30% faster is a game changer. Flutter is a life-saver for startups that want to create mobile solutions.

Considering new technologies like Flutter, the community around that specific technology is essential to adopting and improving the technology with honest feedback. I think the huge and welcoming community was one of the most important reasons to adopt and start using Flutter for my new projects. I want to thank the community builder and program managers for building the Flutter community worldwide.

Please share with us about something you’ve built in the past using Google tools.

After learning about ML Kit capabilities at Google IO 2018, I implemented ML Kit’s Text Recognition API on one of my iOS applications. It was surprisingly easy to build the solution, and the confidence rate was very high. Later that day, I also wrote a blog post for the Google Developer Community about the project and how smooth the integration was.

Knowing how to use technology to build creative solutions and what is possible with this kind of tech is a powerful skill. In the startup's early days, my cofounder and I attended a hackathon, and we won first place with the project in which we used ML Kit and Firebase. One of the project's key features was detecting the indicator number on the counter, which is used for utility usage via ML Kit's text recognition and alerting the user when there is water leakage.

What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?

Improve analytical and problem-solving skills early in your developer journey, and continuously invest in these skills!

A good developer should be able to identify and solve problems. Problem-solving is about using logic and imagination to analyze a situation and then develop smart solutions to that problem. Follow the tech leaders and influencers in your area of interest and learn something new every day!

Katerina Skroumpelou

Google Developer Expert, Angular, Web Technologies, and Google Maps Platform
Senior Software Engineer at Nx
Athens, Greece
Find me on: Twitter

What Google tools have you used to build?

I have used Firebase, Google Cloud Platform, Google Cloud Functions, Google Maps Platform, Angular, Google Cloud Run.

As part of my previous job, our whole infrastructure was built in Firebase, using Cloud Firestore, and Google Cloud Functions used for microservices and also for custom Firestore queries. We also used a combination of Google Cloud Run and Cloud Storage for scheduled backups. In a previous position, I used the Google Maps JS API, which now has evolved into so much more as part of the Google Maps Platform. Today, I build demos and POCs mostly in my free time, using the Google Maps Platform which I love so much. My current role does not involve Google tools at the moment.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

My favorite tool by far is Firebase. I love the robustness and reliability that it offers in developing and publishing a web application. It offers a solution for every part of the process, be it the backend, storage, database, microservices, hosting, authentication, even analytics. All in one place, easy to use and implement. What is also amazing with Firebase is the scalability that it offers. I would opt to use Firebase whether it is a small demo app I am building for a conference, or a large scale application which involves a huge user base, data, and hits per second.

My second favorite tool is, of course, the Google Maps Platform. Maps excite me, and the Google Maps Platform offers much more than visualizing data on a map - which it does in an amazing way. It has become almost a game engine, in a way, providing access to so many different APIs and features of the map itself for the user to tweak.

Please share with us about something you’ve built in the past using Google tools.

I have used Firebase and the Google Cloud Platform to build and ship applications. A few years ago, a couple of friends and myself had an idea that we turned into a product, which we built and scaled solely using the Google Cloud Platform, and specifically the following features: Cloud Firestore, Cloud Storage, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, BigQuery, Maps Platform, Authentication. That’s all you really need to build any app today.

What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?

Be social: Connect with other people by going to on-site conferences. And always be kind.

Continue skill-building: Build small apps and demos to test out different things, and see how they work. Don’t worry about learning all technologies, and don’t “marry” one technology, either. Get a solid foundation of the basics (JavaScript/TypeScript), and then, at your new job, you will learn the technologies they are using there.

Finally, don’t get discouraged by bad days! If you love what you do, you’ll get there in the end, no matter what!