RandoTek: Traveling around Tunisia to share technical knowledge

Posted by Salim Abid, Regional Lead. Middle East & North Africa, Google Developers

Training young Tunisian developers in remote areas

On weekends, the volunteers would travel for hours to new regions, sometimes on bumpy roads and on crowded, rickety buses. Their purpose? To inspire others around the country and teach them about new technologies. When the members of two Google Developer Groups (GDG) in the Beja and Sousse regions of Tunisia came together to address the challenge that many of their fellow Tunisian citizens had limited access to technology. They decided to make a difference by launching Randotek, a program in Tunisia to help train young developers that gets its name from the French word randonne, which means to hike.

Many community members from these chapters, including Alaedeen Eloueryemmi of GDG Sousse and Yasmina Rebai of GDG Beja, support the initiative. Alaedeen, a software engineer, joined GDG Sousse in 2021, after graduating from university, where he co-founded the ESSTHS Google Developer Student Club. Yasmina joined GDG Beja at the suggestions of a software engineer friend.

Sharing technology knowledge and building community

The origin story for GDG RandoTek goes back to January 2022, when Alaedeen gave a talk at DevFest Beja. During his talk, he and the other members of the GDG Beja and GDG Sousse teams noticed many students couldn't follow his talk because of their lack of familiarity with Google technologies. Acknowledging that many of their fellow Tunisian citizens need more access to technology, the GDG RandoTek volunteers began teaching workshops in February 2022.

“We wanted to give others an overview of the community and the new technologies out there,” says Alaedeen. “We want to build a strong community of developers and allow people to achieve their dreams. In Tunisia, people don’t always have access to courses or materials, so we bring that to them.”

Positive impacts for the community

To date, the program generated positive impacts, in Tunisia including:

  • The organizers hosted nine sessions for over 412 developers in eight regions of Tunisia and five cities.
  • The community initiative has run many four-hour workshops on Google technologies including Flutter; Go; Angular; progressive web apps; AI and machine learning; TensorFlow; Google Cloud Platform; and DevOps.
  • Attendees expressed interest in learning more about specific technologies, like Flutter and Cloud, and in joining a GDG group.
  • GDG RandoTek members continue to be asked to give additional workshops, online and in-person, making it a powerful learning experience for them as well.

Building a tech community in Tunisia

The GDG RandoTek organizers note that as more young developers receive training on various technologies, they will feel inspired to form new developer communities in their own local area. The more of those types of groups there are, the easier it will be to reach even more people in Tunisia. “That’s what we want to spread in Tunisia–to have more than one GDSC in every region, and more than one chapter in every place,” says Yasmina. The RandoTek team remains motivated to share knowledge and expand the community with new members.

“What we wanted to do during this program is to share the knowledge,” says Alaedeen. “Share the spirit of community work and get together and learn stuff.” The organizers all seem to share a mutual admiration for helping others. “Seeing how the world evolves each day and the need for technologies in our daily life, I would advise anyone, especially students, to learn as much technology as possible because they’re going to use them someday, somehow,” Yasmina says.

What’s next for GDG RandoTek in Tunisia

For organizers like Aladeen, Yasmina, and their collaborators, the GDG community unlocks potential, creates leaders, and helps people relate to each other through technology. It creates a way to motivate others to become teachers and share technical knowledge and build skills.

“For me, if it wasn’t for GDG, I wouldn’t be the person I am today,” says Alaedeen. “It improved my career, my management skills, and my technical skills, and I want everyone to have that opportunity.”

Visit the Google Developer Groups page and find out how to join a Google Developer Community near you!

This Global Tiger Day, visit tiger.day to help protect these big cats

July 29 is Global Tiger Day, a celebration of the majestic big cats that play a critical role on our planet and serve as cultural and spiritual icons for millions of people. Tigers are influential predators, key to maintaining healthy ecosystems that supply both people and the environment with fresh water, food and health.

Global Tiger Day was founded in 2010, when 13 tiger-range countries (the countries where tigers live in the wild) came together with a goal to double the number of wild tigers in the world — perhaps the most ambitious recovery effort for a single species. World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has partnered with Google Registry to launch the .day domains tiger.day and endangeredspecies.day, to drive attention to this urgent cause.

The team at WWF imagines a world where wild tigers are recovering and thriving. So, how do we get there?

  • Support the Big Cat Public Safety Act. In the U.S., WWF is calling upon Congress to pass the Big Cat Public Safety Act, legislation that would help monitor and regulate the thousands of captive tigers across the U.S. and help prevent them from ending up in the illegal trade in tiger parts and products. Anyone in the U.S. can show their support by contacting their representatives here.
  • Report any suspected illegal wildlife products to theCoalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online. Tiger poaching and the illegal trade of live tigers remains a constant threat to the tiger population. WWF is focusing on efforts that reduce demand for tiger products.
  • Become a tiger advocate. Sharing the importance of protecting tigers and their habitats with your community is an easy thing that anyone do. Consider becoming a Panda Ambassador to engage with others who are also committed to saving wildlife and the environment while supporting WWF.

After a century of decline, overall wild tiger numbers in Asia are starting to trend upward, thanks to the passionate work of many advocates. But there’s so much more to be done.

Tiger recovery is possible when governments, communities, conservation organizations and others work together. Visit tiger.day to learn how you can help protect wild tigers. Because protecting wild tigers protects so much more than just this iconic species.

Tigress and cub (Panthera tigris) in Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, India.

Tigress and cub (Panthera tigris) in Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, India.

© Shutterstock / Bhasmang Mehta / WWF-International

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Supporting fatherhood on fathers.day

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These Lionesses have byte – could analytics help them lift the trophy?

On Sunday, England will face Germany in the final act of this summer’s tournament—one that has pitted the top teams from across Europe against one another, and inspired a generation.

It will take grit, determination and a stunning backheel here or there for England to win. But technology plays a part too. The Football Association’s partnership with Google Cloud has been a vital part of the picture for the lead up to the competition, giving coaches and performance staff access to data and processing muscle that help it select the best squad available at any one time.

The FA’s Player Performance System (PPS) is a central component of Helix—an application and development suite developed by The FA. Helix has been hosted on Google Cloud for the last five years and is used by the Technical Directorate staff associated with both the England women’s and men’s football teams. It provides them with secure access to databases, processes, functions, and compute resources that analyse large volumes of data. It also integrates with visualisation tools to give coaches and performance staff multiple views of data that provides unique insights—customised to end users’ requirements.

This data can include anything from player profiles, to scouting reports, to medical information, to club and international fixtures and results. It also brings in research from metrics pulled from wearable devices, which track players’ training volume and intensity, to allow coaches to better manage their workloads. Coaches also have access to players’ sleep, nutrition, recovery, and mental health data.

“What it allows our users to do is pull together disparate information that they may not be used to seeing side-by-side. This helps us to generate new insights, and hopefully give us an edge when it comes to competitions,” said Craig Donald, CIO at The FA.

Helix provides multi-dimensional insight

Helix tracks more than 3,500 professional footballers and stores more than 22 million player data points collected from competitive games and training sessions. The platform relies on various Google Cloud tools, glued together by a complex microservice system, which is used to update the data being collected, analysed, and stored. Google Cloud Storage is also used to host The FA’s video archives of competitive games. As many as 400 games a day make their way into The FA database, each one creating up to a 5GB file size and 600MB of video tracking data.

Image of three Lioness football players with the middle one holding a football. Data points are circled in yellow, red and blue howcasing how Google Cloud technology is used to look at performance.

This means the FA has faster, more convenient access to data, plus greater insight into player and team performance, which can aid in both the selection and choice of tactics in any given fixture. The additional power and capacity of the GCP hosting infrastructure helps The FA quickly and cost effectively scale up its analytics capabilities to handle additional data sets during forthcoming competitions.

It often seems in football that everybody has their own idea of the best players to pick and the tactics to adopt. But the combination of granular data metrics and cloud architecture deployed by The FA and Google Cloud might actually give a genuine expert the knowledge to back up those opinions.

But does it mean the Lionesses will win on Sunday? Tune in to find out.

A video that showcases Google Cloud's data products and solutions, and how they help the Lionesses (England Team) be at the top of their game. The video features the Lionesses playing on a football pitch with Google Cloud's technology overlap, taking a deep dive into how they use data to improve performance.
10:25

New integrated email marketing tools for Gmail

What’s changing

For select Google Workspace editions, we’re adding two new features in Gmail which you can use to easily send professional-looking emails to large audiences: 

  • Layouts: You can select from a predefined set of email templates, which feature images, text elements, and buttons. You can further customize these templates with your own color schemes, logos, images, footer text, and links. Layouts: You can select from a predefined set of email templates, which feature images, text elements, and buttons. You can further customize these templates with your own color schemes, logos, images, footer text, and links. 




  • Multi-send: This feature allows you to send mass emails without the need to BCC all recipients. By default, multi-send emails include an unsubscribe link unique to each recipient — anyone who unsubscribes is automatically excluded from future multi-send emails from you. 


Additionally, we are introducing an Admin setting to control whether these features are on or off for your users. The admin settings are rolling out now, allowing time to configure availability for their end users in advance. See below for more information. 


These features are only available for Gmail on the web at this time. 


Who’s impacted 

Admins and end users 


Why you’d use them 

We hope these features allow you to quickly and easily create announcements, newsletters, and other mass-email scenarios. Additionally, your recipients will have the ability to unsubscribe from future multi-send emails. 


Getting started 

Admins: 
  • Layouts: This feature is ON by default and at the domain level. You can turn layouts on or off for specific domains, OUs, or groups. 
  • Multi-Send: 
    • For Google Workspace Enterprise Starter and above, as well as Google Workspace for Education customers, this feature is restricted to internal recipients by default. 
    • For Google Workspace Business and Nonprofit customers, multi-send is available by default for external recipients. 
    • For all Google Workspace editions, you can turn multi-send ON for external recipients at the OU or Group level 

  • Note: 
    • These feature launches do not impact the existing send quotas for users.
    • If your organization has disabled Google Drive, Gmail layouts are turned off automatically. 

  • Visit the Help Center to learn more about managing Gmail settings for your users, customizing access policies for different organizational units or groups. 

  • End users: If enabled by your admin, visit the Help Center to learn more about using layouts and multi-send in Gmail. 

Rollout pace 

Admin Controls 
End user functionality 


    Availability 

    • Available to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, Education Plus, Nonprofits, Workspace Individual, and legacy G Suite Basic customers 
    • Not available to Google Workspace Essentials, Education Fundamentals, Education Teaching & Learning, Business Starter, Enterprise Essentials, and Frontline customers as well as legacy G Suite Business customers 

    Resources 

    Chrome Dev for Desktop Update

    The Dev channel has been updated to 105.0.5195.10 for Windows, Mac and Linux.

    A partial list of changes is available in the Git log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.

    Prudhvi Bommana
    Google Chrome

    Dev Channel Update for Desktop

     

    The dev channel has been updated to 105.0.5195.10 for Windows, Mac & Linux.


    A partial list of changes is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.

    Prudhvikumar Bommana
    Google Chrome

    Why voice AI matters and what’s ahead for Assistant

    I’ve been leading the Google Assistant team for over a year now, and I’m inspired every day by the meaningful questions it raises — like how voice can support underserved populations, teach kids new things or help people with impaired speech communicate more easily. This week, as part of VentureBeat’s annual Transform technology conference, I sat down for a virtual fireside chat with Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, to tackle some of these questions and talk about what’s ahead for Assistant.

    As a computer scientist at heart, I had a lot of fun digging into topics like the machine learning (ML) renaissance, the future of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and the incredible power of voice to transform people’s lives. You can watch the whole fireside chat or check out a few takeaways from our conversation below.

    A challenger mindset can push the limits of what’s possible.

    Many folks who’ve worked with me know that I like to challenge assumptions. When it comes to building products at Google, that means using technology in new, sometimes uncharted ways to try and solve real-world problems. When I worked on the Google Ads team, for example, I helped create the first ML-driven ads product by challenging existing assumptions about what ML could do. And I’m super excited to use that same challenger spirit to build a world-class, conversational assistant that truly understands you and helps you get things done. I firmly believe we can continue to change people’s lives if we harness new technologies and challenge the boundaries of what’s possible.

    Voice is a great democratizer.

    There are so many people who are underserved with their information and access needs. We talk about new internet users, or people who can’t read but want to access the world’s information. We now see hundreds of millions of voice queries every day, and that’s continuing to grow among new internet users. In India, for example, nearly 30% of Hindi search queries are spoken. That insight tells us a lot. If you think about reaching these people and making voice a democratizer for access, it’s a compelling area to continue to invest in.

    We’re working to create magical conversational experiences for everyone.

    The holy grail with Google Assistant is to figure out how a computer can understand humans the way humans understand each other. That’s an audacious, ambitious goal. Human language is ambiguous; we rely on many different cues when we speak to each other that are inherent to us as human beings. So we need to teach computers how humans express themselves and to ask: What are they trying to say? That’s what this product strives to be — a natural and conversational assistant. Every day we ask ourselves: How do we create a magical conversational experience, where the computer truly understands what you’re trying to say and adapts to you?

    Pragmatic dreamers can change the world.

    This work can’t be done without the right team. Building the best team of people possible is my number one piece of advice. This is hard stuff; it requires a type of individual I call a “pragmatic dreamer.” You want people who can dream big, but you also need people in the trenches figuring out the real, pragmatic engineering challenges standing in the way. I think it’s really important to create space for a team to ideate and explore the boundaries of what’s possible with technology.

    Put people first and the rest will follow.

    Sometimes we get so enamored by technology that we forget what it's for. I always ask myself: “What are we trying to do for human beings; what are we trying to make better for them?” Sometimes voice can be considered a technology in search of a problem, but I think of it differently. There are real problems people have that this technology can solve. It’s the constant marriage of user problems and what technology can do to solve them. If you keep people as your north star, you can’t go wrong.

    Chrome Dev for Android Update

    Hi everyone! We've just released Chrome Dev 105 (105.0.5195.8) for Android. It's now available on Google Play.

    You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.

    If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.

    Krishna Govind
    Google Chrome

    Our 5 Doodle for Google finalists illustrate self-care

    Since we opened up submissions for the 14th annual Doodle for Google student contest, tens of thousands of K-12 students across 54 U.S. states and territories illustrated their answers to the prompt: “I care for myself by…” Our judges were moved by the creative ways in which these young artists shared how they were prioritizing their well-being.

    After carefully reviewing each submission, we announced our 54 state and territory winners and opened up public voting on our website. Now, the votes are in, the judges have deliberated and we’re ready to announce our five national finalists for the 2022 Doodle for Google contest!

    The finalists were assessed on artistic merit, creativity and how well they addressed the prompt in their artwork and written statements. Each one of them brought intentionality, artistry and heart to their Doodles. Meet our finalists (in age group order):

    • A drawing of a child lying in bed dreaming about outer space, the ocean, tree houses and buildings.
    • A drawing of a family of four in bed together with a quilt that spells out “Google”
    • A drawing of a young girl smelling different dishes including Jollof rice, beef stew, plantains and pounded yam. “Google” is spelled out by the smoke plumes coming from the food.
    • A drawing of two children outdoors enjoying nature with their pet cat and dog.
    • A drawing of a girl tightly hugging her mother in the middle of the word “Google”.

    Grades K-3 National Finalist: Edison Lee, Maryland

    Title: Dreaming of my bright future

    Artist Statement: I care for myself by dreaming of my bright future. In my dreams, I can be anything I want!

    Grades 4-5 National Finalist: Anamirel Campos, Delaware

    Title: Family will always care for you

    Artist Statement: I care for myself by spending time with my family. They taught me many things, but I can't write them all, so I drew them all on a blanket. I love my family!

    Grades 6-7 National Finalist: Faridah Ismaila, Pennsylvania

    Title: My self love

    Artist Statement: I care for myself by making food! I love to make delicious African dishes with my mom. That's why my Doodle shows me smelling all of the delicious African dishes I LOVE!

    Grades 8-9 National Finalist: Grace Dai, Missouri

    Title: The life-cycle of health

    Artist Statement:

    I care for myself by being outdoors, especially with family or my sketchbook. My optimism and mental health soars most when I'm outside, because self-care is like nature; they're both beautiful, intricate systems. Like how a bee pollinates a flower, or how the bird hunts the worm, self-care should be as systematic and natural as life itself.

    Grades 10-12 National Finalist: Sophie Araque-Liu, Florida

    Title: Not alone

    Artist Statement: I care for myself by accepting others’ care for me. Often I struggle to shoulder a burden on my own, and forget that I have so many people, like my mom, who care about me and want to help me. Opening up and letting others support me not only relieves my stress — it also lets me tackle things I could never do on my own.

    Over the next few weeks, our panel of judges will establish which of our five national finalists will be chosen as the national contest winner. In addition to having their artwork featured on the Google homepage for 24 hours, the winner will receive a $30,000 scholarship and a $50,000 technology package for their school.

    Congratulations to our national finalists, and look out for an update on who our 2022 contest winner will be in the next few weeks!