Tag Archives: developers

A new space for Southeast Asian developers in Singapore

Posted by Sami Kizilbash, Developer Relations Program Manager

Last November, Raymond Chan, a data scientist at Chope, attended one of our first ML bootcamps for developers and start-ups in Southeast Asia. Over four days, he gained a deeper understanding of how to use Google Cloud Platform to better structure data from approximately 775,000 records on Chope's real-time restaurant reservation booking platform every day. With this new knowledge, Chope has been able to use that data for more effective and timely decision-making, making it easier for customers to book restaurants.

Last week in Singapore, we opened the Developer Space @ Google Singapore—a space that brings together resources to help Southeast Asian developers, entrepreneurs and community groups grow, plus earn more with their businesses. This is the first physical space dedicated to developers that sits inside a Google office, so developers in Singapore can look forward to benefiting from insights, hands-on mentorship and networking opportunities with various teams working at our Asia Pacific headquarters.

Supporting startups and developers like Raymond, and helping them achieve their full potential is something we're passionate about. In addition to the ML bootcamps which we expect another 800 developers in Singapore to attend by the end of this year, we will run a range of workshops on the latest Google tools and technologies, as well as programs like LeadersLab and Indie Games Accelerator that fuel ecosystem growth. We will also support activities run by community groups like Google Developer Groups, Google Business Groups and Women Techmakers.

With developers and startups from Southeast Asia rapidly driving growth across the region, we can't think of a better place to open this new hub. Come join us throughout the year for an exciting roster of events and meet people who, like Raymond, are looking to build and scale great products. Check out our schedule of events here.

A new space for Southeast Asian developers in Singapore

Posted by Sami Kizilbash, Developer Relations Program Manager

Last November, Raymond Chan, a data scientist at Chope, attended one of our first ML bootcamps for developers and start-ups in Southeast Asia. Over four days, he gained a deeper understanding of how to use Google Cloud Platform to better structure data from approximately 775,000 records on Chope's real-time restaurant reservation booking platform every day. With this new knowledge, Chope has been able to use that data for more effective and timely decision-making, making it easier for customers to book restaurants.

Last week in Singapore, we opened the Developer Space @ Google Singapore—a space that brings together resources to help Southeast Asian developers, entrepreneurs and community groups grow, plus earn more with their businesses. This is the first physical space dedicated to developers that sits inside a Google office, so developers in Singapore can look forward to benefiting from insights, hands-on mentorship and networking opportunities with various teams working at our Asia Pacific headquarters.

Supporting startups and developers like Raymond, and helping them achieve their full potential is something we're passionate about. In addition to the ML bootcamps which we expect another 800 developers in Singapore to attend by the end of this year, we will run a range of workshops on the latest Google tools and technologies, as well as programs like LeadersLab and Indie Games Accelerator that fuel ecosystem growth. We will also support activities run by community groups like Google Developer Groups, Google Business Groups and Women Techmakers.

With developers and startups from Southeast Asia rapidly driving growth across the region, we can't think of a better place to open this new hub. Come join us throughout the year for an exciting roster of events and meet people who, like Raymond, are looking to build and scale great products. Check out our schedule of events here.

A new space for Southeast Asian developers in Singapore

Last November, Raymond Chan, a data scientist at Chope, attended one of our first ML bootcamps for developers and start-ups in Southeast Asia. Over four days, he gained a deeper understanding of how to use Google Cloud Platform to better structure data from approximately 775,000 records on Chope’s real-time restaurant reservation booking platform every day. With this new knowledge, Chope has been able to use that data for more effective and timely decision-making, making it easier for customers to book restaurants.


Today in Singapore, we’re opening the Developer Space @ Google Singapore—a space that brings together resources to help Southeast Asian developers, entrepreneurs and community groups grow, plus earn more with their businesses. This is the first physical space dedicated to developers that sits inside a Google office, so developers here can look forward to benefiting from insights, hands-on mentorship and networking opportunities with various teams working at our Asia Pacific headquarters.  


Supporting startups and developers like Raymond, and helping them achieve their full potential is something we’re passionate about. In addition to the ML bootcamps, we will run a range of workshops on the latest Google tools and technologies, as well as programs like LeadersLab and Indie Games Accelerator that fuel ecosystem growth. We will also support activities run by community groups like Google Developer Groups, Google Business Groups and Women Techmakers.


With developers and startups from Southeast Asia rapidly driving growth across the region, we can’t think of a better place to open this new hub. Come join us throughout the year for an exciting roster of events and meet people who, like Raymond, are looking to build and scale great products. Check out our schedule of events here.
  • Minister Iswaran Google Developer Space Singapore

    Minister S. Iswaran speaking at the opening of the Developer Space @ Google Singapore

  • ML Bootcamp Singapore

    Participants in the Machine Learning Bootcamp. This global series was piloted in Singapore, and we look forward to training another 800 developers here by the end of this year. 

  • Developer Space Singapore 2

    Val Yap, Founder and CEO, PolicyPal speaking at the Developer Space @ Google Singapore opening.

How I started a new career while raising three kids, thanks to Google

Editor’s Note: Since 2016, more than 73,000 people have explored new opportunities with the Google Developer scholarship, part of Grow with Google’s commitment to help people across Europe–from Hungary to rural France–succeed in the digital economy.

Zuzana, a working mother from the U.K., was awarded the Google scholarship and graduated from a Udacity Nanodegree program, enabling her to launch a new career as a web developer. She’s among 21% of all Udacity Nanodegree students in the Grow with Google program in Europe who have received job offers after graduating. With her newfound confidence and skills, Zuzana was able to find the flexibility she needed to balance motherhood and her ideal career. Here is her story:

Being a mom to young kids isn’t easy. There’s always something you need to do for them, and it’s really hard to make time for yourself. So it was a special moment when in 2014, as a 33-year-old mother of two, I graduated with an undergraduate degree in psychology.

I looked forward to applying my new skills, but none of the jobs for psychology graduates offered the flexibility I needed to look after my young family. For a while I worked as a teaching assistant in a school, but though the hours were great, I wasn’t utilizing my degree. I felt stuck. So when I became pregnant with my third child, I decided to make a change.

I searched online for flexible jobs and started reading about people who had learned how to code and just months later were working from home. I’d never been interested in technology before– I simply thought that wasn’t me. But out of curiosity, I started to look into what developers do.

When I read about web accessibility, something clicked. Web accessibility is about making the web accessible to all, regardless of a person’s disabilities. Since I knew about the issues disabled people might have (like attention disorders, fine motor skills deficiency and sight impairment), I could see how these issues could affect them when using the web.

Learning web accessibility would allow me to apply psychology in a flexible work arrangement, and I could learn how to do it in my own time. I thought, Wow! Finally, there's something for me as a mom and as a person!

The Udacity Nanodegree program offered both a course on accessibility and a schedule that would fit my family commitments. I never thought I would get the Developer Scholarship from Google when I applied, so I was amazed to get an email saying I had been accepted.

I’d found it hard to think of myself as a web developer, but the scholarship changed that. It made me feel that someone believed in me, so I should believe in myself. The online interaction on the course was incredible, so I never felt like I was studying alone. Even so, when I was completing my Nanodegree program, it was a big step for me to go to a local tech meetup and present a talk to experienced developers. After I spoke, developers came up to me and told me how much they enjoyed my presentation. And shortly after that, one of them offered me my first job, as a web developer for a branding agency.

Whether it was psychology or programming, I've been hard at work studying ever since my first child was born. When I got that very first job, the kids celebrated with me because they knew how much hard work I’d put into it. I’m so glad I can be there for them–cooking, spending time together, helping them with their homework–and also focus on myself. The opportunity has opened new doors for my career, while keeping the door to my family wide open, too. I feel like I’ve finally found my perfect balance.

Hello, .dev!

Posted by Ben Fried, VP, CIO, & Chief Domains Enthusiast

Developers, designers, writers and architects: you built the web. You make it possible for the billions of people online today to do what they do. Have you ever tried to register your preferred domain name, only to find out it's not available? Today, Google Registry is announcing .dev, a brand new top-level domain (TLD) that's dedicated to developers and technology. We hope .dev will be a new home for you to build your communities, learn the latest tech and showcase your projects—all with a perfect domain name.

Check out what some companies, both big and small, are doing on .dev:

  • Want to build a website? Both GitHub.dev and grow.dev have you covered.
  • Trying to create more inclusive products? Visit accessibility.dev for digital accessibility solutions.
  • Learn about Slack's helpful tools, libraries, and SDKs at slack.dev.
  • Connect with Women Who Code at women.dev.
  • Who doesn't want to do more with their time? Jetbrains.dev offers software solutions that make developers more productive.
  • Want to brush up on your skills (or learn new ones)? Check out Codecademy.dev.
  • Learn how to build apps on the Salesforce platform at crm.dev.
  • Interested in learning how to increase the agility and productivity of your data team? Visit dataops.dev.
  • Want to build & deploy serverless apps on a global cloud network? You can do that with Cloudflare at workers.dev.
  • Get a sneak peek of what's running under the hood of the Niantic Real World Platform at ar.dev.

Like our recent launches for .app and .page, this new domain will be secure by default because it requires HTTPS to connect to all .dev websites. This protects people who visit your site against ad malware and tracking injection by internet service providers, and from spying when using open WiFi networks. With every .dev website that's launched, you help move the web to an HTTPS-everywhere future.

Starting today at 8:00 a.m. PT and through February 28, .dev domains are available to register as part of our Early Access Program, where you can secure your desired domains for an additional fee. The fee decreases according to a daily schedule. Beginning on February 28, .dev domains will be available at a base annual price through your registrar of choice. To find out pricing from our participating partners, visit get.dev.

Google has already started using .dev for some of our own projects, like web.dev and opensource.dev. Visit get.dev to see what companies like Mozilla, Netflix, Glitch, Stripe, JetBrains and more are doing on .dev and get your own domain through one of our registrar partners. We look forward to seeing what you create on .dev!

Hello, .dev!

Developers, designers, writers and architects: you built the web. You make it possible for the billions of people online today to do what they do. Have you ever tried to register your preferred domain name, only to find out it's not available? Today, Google Registry is announcing .dev, a brand new top-level domain (TLD) that's dedicated to developers and technology. We hope .dev will be a new home for you to build your communities, learn the latest tech and showcase your projects—all with a perfect domain name.

Check out what some companies, both big and small, are doing on .dev:

  • Want to build a website? Both GitHub.dev and grow.dev have you covered.
  • Trying to create more inclusive products? Visit accessibility.dev for digital accessibility solutions.
  • Learn about Slack’s helpful tools, libraries, and SDKs at slack.dev.
  • Connect with Women Who Code at women.dev.
  • Who doesn’t want to do more with their time? Jetbrains.dev offers software solutions that make developers more productive.
  • Want to brush up on your skills (or learn new ones)? Check out Codecademy.dev.
  • Learn how to build apps on the Salesforce platform at crm.dev.
  • Interested in learning how to increase the agility and productivity of your data team? Visit dataops.dev.
  • Want to build & deploy serverless apps on a global cloud network? You can do that with Cloudflare at workers.dev.
  • Get a sneak peek of what’s running under the hood of the Niantic Real World Platform at ar.dev.

Like our recent launches for .app and .page, this new domain will be secure by default because it requires HTTPS to connect to all .dev websites. This protects people who visit your site against ad malware and tracking injection by internet service providers, and from spying when using open WiFi networks. With every .dev website that’s launched, you help move the web to an HTTPS-everywhere future.

Starting today at 8:00 a.m. PT and through February 28, .dev domains are available to register as part of our Early Access Program, where you can secure your desired domains for an additional fee. The fee decreases according to a daily schedule. Beginning on February 28, .dev domains will be available at a base annual price through your registrar of choice. To find out pricing from our participating partners, visit get.dev.

Google has already started using .dev for some of our own projects, like web.dev and opensource.dev. Visit get.dev to see what companies like Mozilla, Netflix, Glitch, Stripe, JetBrains and more are doing on .dev and get your own domain through one of our registrar partners. We look forward to seeing what you create on .dev!

Encryption for everyone: How Adiantum will keep more devices secure

Editor's note: February 5 was Safer Internet Day, but we’ll be talking about it all week with a collection of posts from teams from across Google.


Encryption is incredibly important. It underpins our digital security. Encryption encodes data so that it can only be read by individuals with a key. With encryption, you are in complete control of this key, and you can store sensitive information such as personal data securely.

But encryption isn’t always practical, since it would slow some computers, smartphones and other devices to the point of being unusable. That changes with Adiantum, which we are introducing today in the spirit of Safer Internet Day.

Adiantum is a new form of encryption that we built specifically to run on phones and smart devices that don’t have the specialized hardware to use current methods to encrypt locally stored data efficiently. Adiantum is designed to run efficiently without that specialized hardware. This will make the next generation of devices more secure than their predecessors, and allow the next billion people coming online for the first time to do so safely. Adiantum will help secure our connected world by allowing everything from smart watches to internet-connected medical devices to encrypt sensitive data. (For more details about the ins and outs of Adiantum, check out the security blog.)

Our hope is that Adiantum will democratize encryption for all devices. Just like you wouldn’t buy a phone without text messaging, there will be no excuse for compromising security for the sake of device performance. Everyone should have privacy and security, regardless of their phone’s price tag.

Source: Android


Oracle v. Google and the future of software development

Today we asked the Supreme Court of the United States to review our long-running copyright dispute with Oracle over the use of software interfaces. The outcome will have a far-reaching impact on innovation across the computer industry.

Standardized software interfaces have driven innovation in software development. They let computer programs interact with each other and let developers easily build technologies for different platforms. Unless the Supreme Court steps in here, the industry will be hamstrung by court decisions finding that the use of software interfaces in creating new programs is not allowed under copyright law.

With smartphone apps now common, we sometimes forget how hard it once was for developers to build apps across a wide range of different platforms. Our 2008 release of the open-source Android platform changed the game. It helped developers overcome the challenges of smaller processors, limited memory, and short battery life, while providing innovative features and functionality for smartphone development. The result was a win for everyone: Developers could build new apps, manufacturers could build great new devices, and the resulting competition gave consumers both lower prices and an extraordinary range of choice.

We built Android following the computer industry’s long-accepted practice of re-using software interfaces, which provide sets of commands that make it easy to implement common functionality—in the same way that computer keyboard short-cuts like pressing “control” and “p” make it easy to print. Android created a transformative new platform, while letting millions of Java programmers use their existing skills to create new applications. And the creators of Java backed the release of Android, saying that it had “strapped another set of rockets to the [Java] community’s momentum.”

But after it acquired Java in 2010, Oracle sued us for using these software interfaces, trying to profit by changing the rules of software development after the fact. Oracle’s lawsuit claims the right to control software interfaces—the building blocks of software development—and as a result, the ability to lock in a community of developers who have invested in learning the free and open Java language.

A court initially ruled that the software interfaces in this case are not copyrightable, but that decision was overruled. A unanimous jury then held that our use of the interfaces was a legal fair use, but that decision was likewise overruled. Unless the Supreme Court corrects these twin reversals, this case will end developers’ traditional ability to freely use existing software interfaces to build new generations of computer programs for consumers. Just like we all learn to use computer keyboard shortcuts, developers have learned to use the many standard interfaces associated with different programming languages. Letting these reversals stand would effectively lock developers into the platform of a single copyright holder—akin to saying that keyboard shortcuts can work with only one type of computer.

The U.S. Constitution authorized copyrights to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” not to impede creativity or promote lock-in of software platforms. Leading voices from business, technology, academia, and the nonprofit sector agree and have spoken out about the potentially devastating impacts of this case.

We support software developers’ ability to develop the applications we all have come to use every day, and we hope that the Supreme Court will give this case the serious and careful consideration it deserves.  

Three reasons to participate in Hash Code this year

Hash Code, Google’s team programming competition, is back...and this time, it’s going global. Think you could optimize video serving on YouTube? Or how about route Loon balloons to provide Internet coverage? These are all prompts from past competitions—so if you think you’re up for the challenge, register today and join developers around the world as they tackle a new Google engineering problem. Hash Code 2019 kicks off with the Online Qualification Round on Thursday, February 28th. Top teams from this round will be invited to Google Ireland in April to compete for cash prizes and the title of Hash Code 2019 Champion.

Whether you’re new to programming or a coding competition pro, there are plenty of reasons to participate in Hash Code. Here are our top three:

  1. Optimization problems for the win. Just like the problems that Google engineers tackle, there’s never one right answer to a Hash Code problem. Instead, each round of the competition is designed as a “battle of heuristics”—imperfect solutions. There are many ways to approach the challenge, and teams should continuously iterate on their solution throughout the round. Getting familiar with past problems is the best way to prepare; hold a practice session (or two) with your team using the Hash Code archive.
  2. Hash Code is all about community. From competing on a team of two to four people, to participating in the competition from a Hash Code hub (a local meetup that you can organize), opportunities to connect with other Hash Coders are everywhere. This is the first year Hash Code is open to developers globally, and we’re excited to see this community continue to grow. Meet other Hash Coders, find teammates and stay up-to-date on all the latest Hash Code buzz in our Facebook group.
  3. Googley fun. Hash Code is an opportunity to get a glimpse into software engineering at Google, and when our teams come together to solve challenging problems, you can bet they have some fun while doing it. Hash Code’s no different—take a look at last year’s Final Round highlight reel to see what we mean, or check out the #HashCode conversations on social media.

The best way to experience Hash Code is to discover it for yourself. Register at g.co/hashcode by February 25th to be a part of this year’s competition.

Stop the presses: How a new publishing platform can help local news

The challenges of local newsrooms are well-documented. Newspapers with long histories have had to cut back on staff and reduce coverage and reporters who try to start new digital publications face an interminable struggle with technical and business problems. It just doesn’t make sense, for instance, that every team of local reporters should have to invent the right mix of product features, get world-class tech and user experience talent, and then turn it all into the perfect bespoke publishing system to get their stories to readers.

Shouldn't doing great editorial work be enough?

We think so, and that's why the Google News Initiative has partnered with Automattic/WordPress and invested $1.2 million in its effort to create Newspack: a fast, secure, low-cost publishing system tailor-made to the needs of small newsrooms. Other funders include the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Civil Media collectively contributing another $1 million.

Journalists should be writing stories and covering their communities, not worrying about  designing websites, configuring CMSs, or building commerce systems. Their publishing platform should solve these problems for them. So while Newspack publishers will have access to all the plugins created by the WordPress developer community, the core product is not trying to be all things to all publishers. It is trying to help small publishers succeed by building best practices into the product while removing distractions that may divert scarce resources. We like to call it "an opinionated CMS:” it knows the right thing to do, even when you don’t.

ut what about where there are no proven models for success? Automattic will be working in partnership with Spirited Media and News Revenue Hub to better understand the features and capabilities that contribute to publisher success and to measure the business impact of those features. We'll also be advising on the Newspack feature set, based on feedback from our extensive contact with local publishers, and providing technical support on the integration of Google products.

The Newspack project takes another step—following on our Google News Initiative Cloud Program and GNI/YouTube innovation funding—towards our goal of local news sustainability by providing critical pieces of technology at high quality and low cost.

Newspack will begin development in the coming weeks, and will be made available to publishers globally later in the year.