Every year, GDC is a moment to celebrate our successes and learn from one another. Although we won’t be gathering in person this year, we’re bringing you the latest updates at our Google for Games Developer Summit, where developers can watch the announcements and virtually attend sessions for free at g.co/gamedevsummit.
We also realize this may have been a big sacrifice for your teams. For some, GDC is a major opportunity for annual business development and marketing strategies. That’s why we’ve partnered with WINGS andthe GDC Relief Fund to support teams in continuing to do what they do best: build world-class games.
Now more than ever, games are helping players around the globe feel more connected. To ensure you have access to the tools you need to deliver the best possible game experiences, our teams have been building solutions to help you tackle your biggest challenges and set you up for long-term success. You can check out the highlights below:
Build games and reach a wider audience with Android and Google Play
We’re making it easier for you to build and optimize games on Android. Learn about new tools to help your development process, provide greater insights into your game’s performance, and access a wider player base. Once you’re ready to publish, review our updated guidance to ensure your game is high-quality and leverages various features and services for a successful go-to-market with Google Play.
Grow your business with Google Ads and AdMob
The best game developers think about their players first—both when creating experiences people love and building sustainable businesses. Google Ads and AdMob are introducing new ways to analyze and utilize player insights to help you grow your games and earn the revenue you need to improve them over time.
Simply scale your global game with Google Cloud Game Servers
Hosting and scaling a global game can be challenging and requires that you either build costly solutions, or turn to pre-packaged ones that limit choice and control. To offer you more choices and time to dedicate to core elements of producing games, the Google Cloud team is introducing a simplified, convenient way for managing game server clusters.
Build and publish the next generation of games with Stadia
New game platforms present new challenges and opportunities for game creators and Google is here to help. For developers of all sizes looking to bring their games to Stadia, the team is unveiling Stadia Makers, a new program to support the independent development community.
We’re excited to see this community continue to delight players around the world, and we look forward to building what’s next, together. From all of us, thank you for keeping this community thriving.
A year ago, our Google Registry team launched .dev—a top-level domain (TLD) for developers, designers, technical writers, and technology enthusiasts. This new TLD gave people the chance to register memorable domain names that can be hard to find on older domains, with a descriptive ending that’s especially relevant to them.
The .dev TLD is on the HSTS preload list, which means it’s secure for both website owners and their visitors. Placement on the HSTS preload list ensures HTTPS encryption for your entire website, which helps protect visitors against ad malware, tracking injection from ISPs, and potential spying when using open Wi-Fi networks. With so much built-in security, .dev has become the natural place for technology makers to share resources, showcase great work, and foster community.
In the last year, over 150,000 .dev domains have been registered, and we’ve seen many creative uses of the TLD. Here are just a few of the exciting examples we’ve seen.
Atlassian launched both software.dev and cicd.dev to share insights into today’s software development landscape and how software and IT professionals use CI/CD tools. Using .dev domains helped them market both sites, which have sparked conversations on social media among the developer community.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare launched workers.dev to help developers build serverless websites and applications that deploy directly onto subdomains of workers.dev. The TLD made it possible for Cloudflare to use a domain name that’s both descriptive and easy to remember. And over the last year, they’ve seen developers create handy apps like this “lazy invoice” tool.
Salesforce
Salesforce used lwc.dev to launch a site dedicated to Lightning Web Components (their open source project) where professional developers can find online documentation, copy source code for various recipes, and engage with the Lightning Web Components community.
Google Developer Relations
The Google Developer Relations team launched google.dev for developers to explore and learn about all the technologies Google has to offer. You can sign up for the waitlist for the beta version of google.dev, which lets developers create profiles and earn badges by passing technical challenges. The team sends out new invites regularly, so be sure to sign up.
Go Programming Language
Our Go Language team launched go.dev on the 10th anniversary of the open source programming language to provide Go developers a hub where they can find learning resources, including featured use cases and customer stories of other companies using Go.
Build your own .dev experience
From the start, we envisioned .dev as a home for developers and technology makers, and it’s been wonderful to see all the amazing work showcased in this domain. To celebrate .dev’s first birthday, we created a short video of some of our favorite .dev users sharing their tips for building great websites. We hope you’ll find it useful as you begin your next project, and we hope it inspires you to create your own .dev experience. Visit get.dev to learn more and get started.
Editor’s Note: Guest authors Diego Moreno and Sophia Deng (@sophdeng) are from Gigster, a firm that builds dynamic teams made of top global talent who create industry-changing custom software.
Prelude: Data input & management … three general choices
Google Cloud provides multiple services for gathering and managing data. Google Forms paired with Google Sheets are quite popular as they require no engineering resources while being incredibly powerful, providing storage of up to 5 million rows of data and built-in analytics for small team projects.
At the other end of the spectrum, to support a high volume of users or data, Google Cloud provides advanced serverless platforms like Google App Engine (web app-hosting) and Google Cloud Functions (function/service-hosting) that can use Google Cloud Firestore for fast and scalable data storage. These are perfect for professional engineering teams that need autoscaling to respond to any level of user traffic and data input. Such apps can also be packaged into a container and deployed serverlessly on Google Cloud Run.
However, it's quite possible your needs are right in-between. Today, we're happy to present the Gigster story and their innovative use of Google Apps Script—a highly-accessible service conventionally relegated to simple macro and add-on development, but which Gigster used to its advantage, building robust systems to transform their internal operations. Apps Script is also serverless, meaning Gigster didn't have to manage any servers for their application nor did they need to find a place to host its source code.
The Gigster story
Gigster enables distributed teams of software engineers, product managers and designers to build software applications for enterprise clients. Over the past five years, Gigster has delivered thousands of projects, all with distributed software teams. Our group, the Gigster Staffing Operations Team, is responsible for assembling these teams from Gigster’s network of over 1,000 freelancers.
Two years ago, our team began building custom software to automate the multi-stage and highly manual team staffing process. Building internal software has allowed the same-size Staffing Operations Team (3 members!) to enjoy a 60x reduction in time spent staffing each role.
The Apps Script ecosystem has emerged as the most critical component in our toolkit for building this internal software, due to its versatility and ease of deployment. We want to share how one piece of the staffing process has evolved to become more powerful over time thanks to Apps Script. Ultimately, we hope that sharing this journey enables all types of teams to build their own tools and unlock new possibilities.
End-to-end automation in Google Sheets
Staffing is an operationally intensive procedure. Just finding willing and able candidates requires numerous steps:
Gathering and formatting customer requirements.
Communicating with candidates through multiple channels.
Logging candidate responses.
Processing paperwork for placement
To add complexity, many of these steps require working with different third-party applications. For awhile, we performed every step manually, tracking every piece of data generated in one central Sheet (the “Staffing Broadcast Google Sheet”). At a certain point, this back-and-forth work to log data from numerous applications became unsustainable. Although we leveraged Google Sheets features like Data Validation rules and filters, the Staffing Broadcast Sheet could not alleviate the high degree of manual processes that were required of the team.
The centralized Staffing Broadcast Google Sheet provided organization, but required a high degree of manual entry for tracking candidate decisions.
The key transformation was integrating Sheets data with third-party APIs via Apps Script. This enabled us to cut out the most time-consuming operations. We no longer had to flip between applications to message candidates, wait for their replies, and then manually track responses.
To interact with these APIs, we built a user interface directly into the Staffing Broadcast Google Sheet. By introducing an information module, as well as drop-down lists and buttons, we were able to define a small set of manual actions versus the much wider list of tasks the tool would perform automatically across multiple applications.
By integrating Google Apps Script with third-party APIs and creating a user interface, we evolved the Staffing Broadcast Tool to centralize and automate almost every step of the staffing process.
doPost() is the key function in our staffing tool that facilitates third-party services triggering our Apps Script automations. Below is a snippet of how we listened to candidates' responses from a third-party messaging application. In this case, queueing the third-party message in a Google Sheet so it can be processed with improved error-handling.
/** * Receive POST requests and record to queue. */ doPost(e) { var payload = e.postData.contents; SpreadsheetApp.openById(SPREADSHEET_ID) .getSheetByName("Unprocessed") .appendRow([payload]); return ContentService.createTextOutput(""); // Return 200 }
Almost all manual work associated with finding candidates was automated through the combination of integrations with third-party APIs and having a user interface to perform a small, defined set of actions. Our team’s day-to-day became shockingly simple: select candidates to receive messages within the Staffing Broadcast Tool, then click the “Send Broadcast” button. That’s it. The tool handled everything else.
Leveraging Sheets as our foundation, we fundamentally transformed our spreadsheet into a custom software application. The spreadsheet went from a partially automated datastore to a tool that provided an end-to-end automated solution, requiring only the click of a few buttons to execute.
Evolution into a standalone application
While satisfied, we understood that having our application live in Google Sheets had its limitations, namely, it was difficult for multiple team members to simultaneously use the tool. Using doGet(), the sibling to doPost(), we began building an HTML frontend to the Staffing Broadcast Tool. In addition to resolving difficulties related to multiple users being in a spreadsheet, it also allowed us to build an easier-to-use and more responsive tool by leveraging Bootstrap & jQuery.
Having multiple users in a single Google Sheet can create conflicts, but Apps Script allowed us to build a responsive web app leveraging common libraries like Bootstrap & jQuery that eliminated those problems while providing an improved user experience.
When other teams at Gigster got wind of what we built, it was easy to grant access to others beyond the Staffing Operations Team. Since Apps Script is part of the G Suite developer ecosystem, we relied on Google’s security policies to help deploy our tools to larger audiences.
While this can be done through Google’s conventional sharing tools, it can also be done with built-in Apps Script functions like Session.getActiveUser() that allow us to restrict access to specific Google users. In our case, those within our organization plus a few select users.
To this day, we continue to use this third version of the Staffing Broadcast Tool in our daily operations as it supports 100% of all client projects at Gigster.
Conclusion
By fundamentally transforming the Staffing Broadcast Tool with Apps Script, Gigster’s Staffing Operations Team increased its efficiency while supporting the growth of our company. Inspired by these business benefits, we applied this application-building approach using Apps Script for multiple tools, including candidate searching, new user onboarding, and countless automations.
Our team’s psychological shift about how we view what we are capable of, especially as a non-engineering team, has been the most valuable part of this journey. By leveraging an already familiar ecosystem to build our own software, we have freed team members to become more self-sufficient and valuable to our customers.
To get started on your Apps Script journey, we recommend you check out the Apps Script Fundamentals playlist and the official documentation. And if you're a freelancer looking to build software applications for clients, we’re always looking for talented software engineers, product managers or designers to join Gigster’s Talent Network.
Thank you to Sandrine Bitton, the third member of the Staffing Operations Team, for all her help in the development of the Staffing Broadcast Tool.
Calling all coders: Hash Code, Google’s annual team programming competition, is back for 2020—and you can register today atg.co/hashcode.
Hash Code was created back in 2014 by a few engineers in the Google France office. These engineers were coding competition enthusiasts and wondered if it would be possible to create a new kind of coding competition, one that looked more like the type of work they did each day.
While Hash Code shares similarities with other programming competitions, there are four things that we think make it especially Googley:
Teamwork makes the dream work. Just like software engineers at Google, you work in a small team during Hash Code. So while coding ability is important, so are teamwork and communication skills. Don’t have a team? Don’t worry! You can register and find a team later using our Facebook group.
Launch, iterate, repeat. There’s never a “right” answer to a Hash Code problem. Teams spend the entirety of each round working on one challenge, continuously trying to improve their solution. In computer science, this is referred to as an optimization problem, and it’s similar to problems you’d encounter working as an engineer at Google. Also, here’s one pro tip: Your team should submit early and often during the competition so you can test your solutions and keep improving them!
Visit Google’s European headquarters. Hash Code takes place over two rounds: First up is the Online Qualification Round on Feb. 20, after which the top teams will be invited to Google’s Dublin office for the Final Round on April 25 (check out last year’s Final Round highlights). While it’s awesome to make it to the Final Round, we encourage teams taking part in the Online Qualification Round to focus on trying their best, learning something new, and—of course—having fun!
Want to get involved? There’s something for everyone in a Hash Code challenge, so whether you’ve just started coding or you’ve been participating in programming competitions for years, head over to g.co/hashcode to register today and be part of the #HashCode fun. We’ll see you for the Online Qualification Round on Feb. 20!
Today we’re announcing the 2020 edition of the Google Play Indie Games Festival, a celebration of the passion, creativity and innovation that indie game developers bring to the Google Play store.
This year we will host three competitions for indie game developers from Japan, South Korea and several European countries. The top 20 creators in each region will be chosen to showcase their games at public events in Tokyo, Seoul and Warsaw. Players, industry experts and the Google Play team will vote to select the top 10, and from there, three winners for each regional contest will be crowned.
Prizes are designed to help indie developers showcase their games and grow their businesses on Google Play. This includes things like promotions on the Google Play Store and chances to network with industry experts and influencers. Winners could even go home with the latest Android devices, which can help them curb development costs.
If you make indie games and meet the eligibility criteria, enter your game by March 2, 2020.
The contests aren’t just for developers, though. If you like playing unique, creative, high quality games, you can sign up to attend the final events in Warsaw, Tokyo and Seoul, where you’ll get the chance to play the games, meet the developers, vote for your favorites, help choose the winners….and of course, have a little fun.
Need some inspiration? Check out the winners of the 2019 edition in Europe.
South Africa has the world’s highest recorded youth unemployment rate. Many young people are unable to access job opportunities due to a lack of financial resources and necessary work experience. Allan van der Muelen, the co-founder of start-up Zlto, is changing this.
Zlto is a web-based digital rewards platform that incentivizes young people to gain work experience by volunteering in the community. Users build a digital resume by uploading completed work assignments, showing both their impact on the project and the skills they gained while completing the task. For each project they also earn Zlto, a digital currency that can be spent on a range of items, like food, clothing, mobile data and transportation, thanks to collaborations with national retail partners.
“I work with young people to show them that they do have choices and the Web is giving them access to even more,” he says. In 2018, Zlto won the Google Impact Challenge and more recently started working with Chrome engineers to streamline their web app.
Zlto’s user dashboard is the portal to volunteer opportunities and provides a progress summary.
People access Zlto through devices with limited capabilities and with limited data and connections. So providing them with instant access to the platform is critical to the company’s success. By building on the web, the Zlto team was able to make the app widely accessible. A typical Zlto user accesses their web app three times a day, so it’s critical that their experience is reliable. The Zlto team uses modern web technologies to ensure the app is responsive and reliable, and they use tools including Google’s Lighthouse to monitor the app’s performance and make instant fixes.
Zlto is having a notable impact in the Cape Town Flats, securing permanent work for more than 2,300 young people in the last 12 months; there are 36,000 volunteers working with more than 1.2 million people in the community. The team is now piloting the launch of Zlto in Tanzania as well as the United Kingdom, working with the Newbigin House charity in support of asylum seekers and other individuals.
Summary: Flutter Interact is happening on December 11th. Sign up here for our global livestream and watch it atg.co/FlutterInteract. Google’s conference focusing on beautiful designs and apps, Flutter Interact, is streaming worldwide on December 11. Flutter Interact is a day dedicated to creation and collaboration. Whether you are a web developer, mobile developer, front-end engineer, UX designer, or designer, this is a good opportunity to hear the latest from Google. This one-day event has several talks focused on different topics regarding development and design. Speakers include Matias Duarte, VP of Google Design; Tim Sneath, Group PM for Flutter and Dart; and Grant Skinner, CEO, GSkinner, Inc.
What to expect at Flutter Interact
Flutter Interact will focus on creating eye-catching experiences across devices. We’ll showcase the latest from Google Design and from Flutter, Google’s free and open source UI toolkit to build beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. This event is tailored to a global audience, with a worldwide livestream, hundreds of viewing parties, and the opportunity to ask questions that are answered at the event.
It will include content and announcements from the Material Design and Flutter teams, partners, and other companies.
Tune in to the livestream
Go to g.co/FlutterInteract and sign up for livestream updates. The event will be broadcasted on the website on Dec 11, with a keynote starting at 10:00 a.m. EST (GMT-5). You can also add this event directly to your Google Calendar.
Join a local viewing party
People and organizations all over the world are hosting over 450 free viewing parties to watch and discuss Flutter Interact. Find one of the hundreds of viewing parties happening near you.
Get Involved with #AskFlutter and #FlutterInteract
Flutter Interact is geared toward our online audience. There are two main ways to get involved.
#FlutterInteract
The official event hashtag. We will have a social wall that is constantly showing tweets coming in with #FlutterInteract, both on site and on our livestream. Make sure to tweet your pictures, comments, videos, and thoughts while you experience Flutter Interact.
#AskFlutter
Our team will be on site, live, answering questions in real time. Tweet your questions and comments with the #AskFlutter hashtag to connect with the Flutter team (and the open source community), and get your questions answered. Your tweet may also appear on the global livestream during the event.
We are grateful to experience Flutter Interact with you on December 11th. In the meantime, follow us on twitter at @FlutterDev and get started with Flutter at flutter.dev.
Editor’s note: Maurizio Leo is a software engineer-turned baker, and co-founder and developer of SkyView, a stargazing app that uses your camera to identify objects in the sky. As a part of our I Make Apps series, we talk to him about developing his app, as well as his baking side hustle.
1. Tell us about SkyView. How is it useful to people?
SkyView is an augmented reality app we created to educate and inspire others to explore the universe no matter their location, night and day. There's a magical and exciting universe out there to explore, and SkyView's aim has always been to make exploring the sky as effortless and approachable as possible. Just point your device up to the sky and discover a new star, find a new planet, or spot the International Space Station streaking across the sky.
2. How did you get into baking?
I grew up in an Italian household that always emphasized food made by hand. And while I went into computer science because of my curiosity surrounding computers and software, I think cooking and baking has always been a big part of my life. About ten years ago, when I was given a book on baking sourdough as a gift, I was immediately taken by the marriage of craft and science needed to bake a loaf of bread. The precision behind baking bread spoke to me, and the science behind fermentation piqued my logical side. After creating my first sourdough starter from scratch and baking my first loaf, I became obsessed.
3. How do you juggle baking and making apps in your daily life as a developer?
Working from my home office on our app SkyView allows me time between writing lines of code to hop into the kitchen and weigh, mix, or shape a batch of bread dough. It gives me an opportunity to relax my mind for a few moments or perhaps explore a possible solution, much like taking a walk would offer. Sometimes some of my best code breakthroughs were achieved when I was in the kitchen with my hands covered in flour and water! In the end, being an app developer who works at home has allowed me to simultaneously work on software I'm passionate about and explore my dedication to the craft of baking bread.
4. What are the similarities and differences between baking bread and making apps?
At first glance, writing apps and baking sourdough bread seem a world apart—but they have more in common than one might initially think. Both pursuits benefit from a sound plan, precision, adjustment to changing inputs, and iterative improvement. Software certainly is a more analytical and tactical pursuit, while working with something tangible like bread dough satisfies more of my artistic side. For me, these two offer a delicate balance, where software lets me build imaginative structures and baking bread fulfills my desire to slow down and work with my hands. With naturally leavened bread, time is the best ingredient.
5. What has been your experience creating apps on Android & distributing them through Google Play?
We've been working with Android since the beginning (that's over ten years!), and it has always provided us with the right set of tools to help bring our ideas to reality. With modern language constructs, good editing, debugging and reporting tools, and a thoughtful testing framework, we've been able to update and release SkyView with more functionality to delight our users. And, Google Play allows us to quickly deploy our app, reaching millions of people, and keep with our mission to get as many excited about space as we are.
Joe Birch, a developer based in the UK, has a genetic condition that causes low vision. He grew up playing music, but he knows it’s not easy for people who have visual impairments or hearing loss to learn how to play.
He wanted to change that, so he created Chord Assist, which aims to make learning the guitar more accessible for people who are blind, Deaf and mute. It gives instructions on how to play the guitar through braille, a speaker or visuals on a screen, allowing people to have a conversation to learn to play a certain chord.
“Chord Assist” is powered by Actions on Google, a platform that allows developers to create additional commands for unique applications. The guitar is used as a conversational tool to allow the student to learn a chord by simply saying, “Show me how to play a G chord,” for example. The guitar understands the request, and then gives either a voice output or braille output, depending on the need.
“I love seeing people pushing the boundaries and breaking the expectations of others,” Joe says. “When someone builds an innovative project that can change the lives of others, it inspires me to achieve the things that I am passionate about. That’s what this whole developer community is really all about, we are here to inspire each other.”
With the emergence of new technology and easy-to-access educational resources, it’s easier than ever to become a developer. The developer community is global, and is made up of people from all walks of life and backgrounds, with one thing in common—using technology to take an idea and turn it into reality.
That is what the Google Developers Experts program aims to do by connecting 700 outstanding developers around the world. They gather to share the skills they’ve mastered through application development, podcasts, public speaking and bringing technology to local communities. Each Google Developers Expert has experience and expertise in one or more specific Google technologies.
Joe is a GDE focused on Actions on Google and Android, and has been an engineer for seven years. “Being a GDE allows me to fulfill my passion for both technology and education,” Joe says. “I learned so much by following designers and developers online. Seeing the cool work that these people are doing helps to fuel my brain and inspire me for the next idea that I might have.”
As over 400 community-led DevFest events continue to take place around the world, something is becoming clear: kids are taking over. We’re not kidding. Many young students are taking the stage this season to speak on topics ranging from machine learning to robotics, and people are loving it.
At the same time, these kids and the GDG (Google Developers Groups) community organizers of local DevFests are becoming great friends. We saw this recently at a DevFest in San Francisco, where Vikram Tiwari, a GDG Lead, and 11-year-old Aaron Ma, the youngest speaker at the event, had a great conversation on programming.
We wanted to let you in on their conversation, so we asked Vikram to answer a few questions on coding, and then asked Aaron to respond to his answers. Check out their conversation below!
What is your favorite language to code in?
Vikram: I would have to say JavaScript - it used to be the language no one cared about, and then suddenly node.js changed the whole landscape. Nowadays, you can’t escape js, it’s everywhere from browsers to IoT and now even Machine Learning. The best part about using js is the flexibility it gives you. For example, it’s easy to make mistakes in js, but then if you want to prototype quickly, it doesn’t hold you back. And of course, you can’t forget about the vibrant node.js ecosystem, which is always striving for ease of use and speed.
Aaron: Open source is definitely the move! Especially open source competitions because they’re super exciting, let me see where I need to improve, and let me test if I’ve mastered a field of study. I also like to contribute or create my own open-source projects so I can grow as an open-source minded developer. Right now, I am the youngest contributor to Google’s TensorFlow, so to all the other kids out there reading this...come join me!
Do you like jumping right into coding or thinking through every line before you write?
Vikram: I do like to think about the problem beforehand. However, if the problem has already been distilled down, then I like to get right to execution. In this case, I generally start with writing a bunch of pseudo functions, mocking the inputs and outputs of those functions, connecting them together, and then finally writing the actual logic. This approach generally helps me with context switching in a sense that I can stop working on that specific problem at any point and pick it back up from the same position when I get back to it.
Aaron: I like how you think! ?If someone has already implemented the problem and packaged it, I would try to get right to the deployment process. But if no one has implemented the problem, I would first start with writing some pseudocode, and then slowly convert the pseudocode into actual code that works.
What is your favorite part of the DevFest community?
Vikram: That DevFest is a home for all developers, from all walks of life, with all kinds of ideas. Yes, this family loves building your tech skills, but it also loves helping you breakthrough any social barriers you may face. From feeling more comfortable around people to feeling more confident with your code, this community wants to help you do it all.
Aaron: We are a DevFamily! ❤️I couldn’t agree more. My favorite part about DevFest is how this community can inspire. We, as DevFest developers, have the chance to change how we all think about CS every time we get together. From students like myself to long time experts, there is such an open and positive exchange of ideas taking place here - it’s so exciting and always makes me smile. ?
Want to join a conversation like this one? Respond to the questions yourself with the #DevFest or find a DevFest near you, at devfest.withgoogle.com.
Posted by Martin Aguinis, Flutter Marketing Lead
