Tag Archives: Events

Googlers on the road: FOSDEM 2018

The Google Open Source team is currently enjoying summer weather in Sydney at Linux.conf.au, but soon we return to winter weather and head to Brussels for FOSDEM 2018. FOSDEM is a special event, famous for being non-commercial, volunteer-organized, and free to attend. It’s also huge, attracting more than 5,000 attendees.

FOSDEM logo licensed CC BY 2.0 SE.
This year FOSDEM is particularly special as it falls on top of the 20th anniversary of the open source movement and its steward, the Open Source Initiative. (In case you’re wondering, this September will mark the 35th anniversary of the free software movement.) We’re looking forward to celebrating the occasion!

You’ll find us in the hallways, at satellite events, and at our table in the stands area. You’ll also find some Googlers in the conference schedule, as well as folks sharing their experience of the most recent Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

If you’d like to say hello or chat, swing by our table in Building K. The highlight of our trip is meeting hundreds of the thousands of students and mentors who have participated in our programs!

Below are the Googlers who will be giving presentations:

Saturday, February 3rd
12:30pm  Google’s approach to distributed systems observability for Go by JBD (also at 2:30pm)
3:05pm   Testing and Validating distributed systems by Holden Karau

Sunday, February 4th
10:20am  Regular Expression Derivatives in Python by Michael Paddon
11:30am   Advocating For FOSS Inside Companies a panel including Max Sills
3:00pm    Your Build in a Datacenter by Jakob Buchgraber
4:00pm    Accelerating Big Data Outside of the JVM by Holden Karau

Hope to see you there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Googlers on the road: Linux.conf.au 2018

It’s summer in Sydney and Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2018 is just a week away. LCA, an annual event that attracts people from all over the globe, including Googlers, runs January 22nd to 26th.

LCA is a cornerstone of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. It’s volunteer-run, administered by Linux Australia, and has been running since 1999. Despite its name, the conference program covers all things FOSS. The event is five days long and includes two days of miniconfs that make the program even more interesting.

The Google Open Source team is escaping “wintery” Northern California and will be hosting a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session and co-hosting an event with GDG Sydney, both focused on our student programs.

A few Googlers ended up with sessions in the program and one is running a miniconf:

Tuesday, January 23rd
All day     Create hardware with FPGAs, Linux and Python Miniconf hosted by Tim Ansell (sold out)
11:40am  Learn by Contributing to Open Source by Josh Simmons
5:15pm    Assembling a balsa-wood Raspberry Pi case by Josh Deprez

Wednesday, January 24th
3:50pm    Securing the Linux boot process by Matthew Garrett

Thursday, January 25th
12:25pm  Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in Birds of a Feather session
6:00pm    Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in Meetup with GDG Sydney

Friday, January 26th
11:40am  The State of Kernel Self-Protection by Kees Cook
1:40pm    QUIC: Replacing TCP for the Web by Jana Iyengar
2:35pm    The Web Is Dead! Long Live The Web! by Sam Thorogood

Not able to make the conference? They’ll be posting session recordings to YouTube afterwards, thanks in part to students who have worked on TimVideos, a suite of open source software and hardware for recording video, as part of Google Summer of Code.

Naturally, you will also find the Google Open Source team at other upcoming events including FOSDEM. We look forward to seeing you in 2018!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2017 Mentor Summit

This year Google brought over 320 mentors from all over the world (33 countries!) to Google's offices in Sunnyvale, California for the 2017 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. This year 149 organizations were represented, which provided the perfect opportunity to meet like-minded open source enthusiasts and discuss ways to make open source better and more sustainable.
Group photo by Dmitry Levin used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
The Mentor Summit is run as an unconference in which attendees create and join sessions based on their interests. “I liked the unconference sessions, that they were casual and discussion based and I got a lot out of them. It was the place I connected with the most people,” said Cassie Tarakajian, attending on behalf of the Processing Foundation.

Attendees quickly filled the schedule boards with interesting sessions. One theme in this year’s session schedule was the challenging topic of failing students. Derk Ruitenbeek, part of the phpBB contingent, had this to say:
“This year our organisation had a high failure rate of 3 out of 5 accepted students. During the Mentor Summit I attended multiple sessions about failing students and rating proposals and got a lot [of] useful tips. Talking with other mentors about this really helped me find ways to improve student selection for our organisation next time.”
This year was the largest Mentor Summit ever – with the exception of our 10 Year Reunion in 2014 – and had the best gender diversity yet. Katarina Behrens, a mentor who worked with LibreOffice, observed:
“I was pleased to see many more women at the summit than last time I participated. I'm also beyond happy that now not only women themselves, but also men engage in increasing (not only gender) diversity of their projects and teams.”
We've held the Mentor Summit for the past 10+ years as a way to meet some of the thousands of mentors whose generous work for the students makes the program successful, and to give some of them and the projects they represent a chance to meet. This year was their first Mentor Summit for 52% of the attendees, giving us a lot of fresh perspectives to learn from!

We love hosting the Mentor Summit and attendees enjoy it, as well, especially the opportunity to meet each other. In fact, some attendees met in person for the first time at the Mentor Summit after years of collaborating remotely! According to Aveek Basu, who mentored for The Linux Foundation, the event was an excellent opportunity for “networking with like minded people from different communities. Also it was nice to know about people working in different fields from bioinformatics to robotics, and not only hard core computer science.” 

You can browse the event website and read through some of the session notes that attendees took to learn a bit more about this year’s Mentor Summit.

Now that Google Summer of Code 2017 and the Mentor Summit have come to a close, our team is busy gearing up for the 2018 program. We hope to see you then!

By Maria Webb, Google Open Source 

Talk to Google at Node.js Interactive

We’re headed to Vancouver this week, with about 25 Googlers who are incredibly excited to attend Node.js Interactive. With a mix of folks working on Cloud, Chrome, and V8, we’re going to be giving demos and answering questions at the Google booth. 

A few of us are also going to be giving talks. Here’s a list of the talks Googlers will be giving at the conference, ranging from serverless Slack bots to JavaScript performance tuning.

Wednesday, October 4th

Keynote: Franzi Hinkelmann
9:40am - 10:00am, West Ballroom A
Franzi Hinkelmann, Software Engineer @ Google

Franzi is located in Munich, Germany where she works at Google on Chrome V8. Franzi, like James and Anna, is a member of the Node.js Core Technical Committee. She speaks across the globe on the topic of JavaScript virtual machines. She has a PhD in mathematics, but left academia to follow her true passion: writing code.

Franzi will discuss her perspective on Chrome V8 in Node.js, and what the Chrome V8 team is doing to continue to support Node.js. Want to know what the future of browser development looks like? This is a must-attend keynote.

Functionality Abuse: The Forgotten Class of Attacks
12:20pm - 12:50pm, West Ballroom A
Nwokedi Idika, Software Engineer @ Google

If you were given a magic wand that would remove all implementation flaws from your web application, would it be free of security problems? If it took you more five seconds to say “No!” (or if, worse, you said “Yes!”), then you’re the target audience for this talk. If you’re in the target audience, don’t fret, much of the security community is there with you. After this talk, attendees will understand why the answer to the aforementioned question is an emphatic “No!” and they will learn an approach to decrease their chance of failing to consider an important vector of attack for their current and future web applications.

High Performance JS in V8
5:20pm - 5:50pm, West Ballroom A
Peter Marshall, Software Engineer @ Google

This year, V8 launched Ignition and Turbofan, the new compiler pipeline that handles all JavaScript code generation. Previously, achieving high performance in Node.js meant catering to the oddities of our now-deprecated Crankshaft compiler. This talk covers our new code generation architecture - what makes it special, a bit about how it works, and how to write high performance code for the new V8 pipeline.

Thursday, October 5th

New DevTools Features for JavaScript
11:40am - 12:10pm, West Meeting Room 122
Yang Guo, Software Engineer @ Google

Ever since v8-inspector was moved to V8's repository, we have been working on a number of new features for DevTools, usable for both Chrome and Node.js. The talk will demonstrate code coverage, type profiling, and give a deep dive into how evaluating a code snippet in DevTools console works in V8.

Understanding and Debugging Memory Leaks in Your Node.js Applications
12:20pm - 12:50pm, West Meeting Room 122
Ali Sheikh, Software Engineer @ Google

Memory leaks are hard. This talk with introduce developers to what memory leaks are, how they can exist in a garbage collected language, the available tooling that can help them understand and isolate memory leaks in their code. Specifically it will talk about heap snapshots, the new sampling heap profiler in V8, and other various other tools available in the ecosystem.

Workshop: Serverless Bots with Node.js
2:20pm - 4:10pm, West Meeting Room 117
Bret McGowen, Developer Advocate @ Google
Amir Shevat, DevRel @ Slack

This talk will show you how to build both voice and chat bots using serverless technologies. Amir Shevat, Head of Developer Relations at Slack, has overseen 17K+ bots deployed on the platform. He will present a maturing model, as best practices, for enterprise bots covering all sorts of use cases ranging for devops, HR, and marketing. Alan Ho from Google Cloud will then show you how to use various serverless technologies to build these bots. He’ll give you a demo of Slack and Google Assistant bots incorporating Google’s latest serverless technology including Edge (API Management), CloudFunctions (Serverless Compute), Cloud Datastore, and API.ai.

Modules Modules Modules
3:00pm - 3:30pm, West Meeting Room 120
Myles Borins, Developer Advocate @ Google

ES Modules and Common JS go together like old bay seasoning and vanilla ice cream. This talk will dig into the inconsistencies of the two patterns, and how the Node.js project is dealing with reconciling the problem. The talk will look at the history of modules in the JavaScript ecosystem and the subtle difference between them. It will also skim over how ECMA-262 is standardized by the TC39, and how ES Modules were developed.

Keynote: The case for Node.js
4:50pm - 5:05pm, West Ballroom A
Justin Beckwith, Product Manager @ Google

Node.js has had a transformational effect on the way we build software. However, convincing your organization to take a bet on Node.js can be difficult. My personal journey with Node.js has included convincing a few teams to take a bet on this technology, and this community. Let’s take a look at the case for Node.js we made at Google, and how you can make the case to bring it to your organization.


We can’t wait to see everyone and have some great conversations. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter @googlecloud, or request an invite to the Google Cloud Slack community and join the #nodejs channel.

By Justin Beckwith, Languages and Runtimes Team

Professors from Around the World Get Their Students into HFOSS

Over the last four years instructors from around the world have gathered for the Professors’ Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) workshop to integrate open source concepts into their curriculum. At each event, professors make more progress toward providing students with hands on experience via contributions to humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS).

This year Google was proud to not only host a workshop at our San Francisco office in April, but also to collaborate with the organizers to bring a POSSE workshop to Europe for the first time.
POSSE workshop leaders, from left to right: Clif Kussmaul (Muhlenburg College), Lori Postner (Nassau Community College), Stoney Jackson (Western New England University),  Heidi Ellis (Western New England University), Greg Hislop (Drexel University), and Darci Burdge (Nassau Community College).
The workshop in Italy was led by Dr. Gregory Hislop from Drexel University, and Drs. Heidi Ellis and Stoney Jackson from Western New England University, and brought together 20 instructors from Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Macedonia, Qatar, Spain, Swaziland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This was the most geographically diverse workshop to date!
Group photos in San Francisco, USA on April 22, 2017 (left) and Bologna, Italy on July 1, 2017 (right).
What’s next for POSSE? University instructors from institutions in the US can apply now to participate in the next workshop, November 16-18 in Raleigh, NC and join their peers in the community of instructors weaving HFOSS into their curriculum.

By Helen Hu, Google Open Source

RailsConf 2017: a round-up

By Aja Hammerly, Developer Advocate

A few weeks ago the Google Cloud Ruby team attended RailsConf in Phoenix, Arizona. RailsConf is one of the largest conferences for Ruby programmers in the world and we were happy to spend three days learning and sharing with our community. We enjoyed hearing from folks that are currently using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and we're working diligently to integrate their feedback into our future products.

About half of our team had never attended a Ruby conference before. Luckily they were in good company since about half of the attendees at the event were new to Ruby, conferences, tech, or all of the above.

All of us enjoyed the keynotes including Rails core contributor Aaron Patterson's crap data joke and Rails creator DHH's discussion of how community values are reflected in programming languages and frameworks. He used Python and Ruby as his examples and showed how while they both share some values like "Readability Counts" they also differ on values like whether there should only be one way to do something.

Daniel Azuma, an engineer on the Google Ruby team, gave a talk titled "What’s my app *really* doing in production?" With so many new Rubyists at the conference this was a fine opportunity to teach people about some of the tools for debugging and profiling that are built in to Ruby and Rails. Among other things, he discussed how you can use ActiveSupport::Notifications to get more information when specific methods are called.

Remi Taylor, another engineer on the Google Ruby team, gave a talk called "Google Cloud <3 Ruby" showing off the new features GCP has for Rubyists. I gave a talk called "Syntax Isn't Everything: NLP for Rubyists” which showed off Google’s Cloud Natural Language API. Both of our talks generated interest in Google's Machine Learning APIs and dozens of people tried out the Cloud Vision codelab back at our booth. In the past, Rubyists haven't been interested in machine learning so it was great to see all the excitement.

At our booth we had great conversations with both new and veteran Rubyists. Many people took advantage of our codelabs to try out Google Cloud with Ruby while there was someone to help available. It was also a chance to have one-on-one conversations with developers from all over the world. Many of the people who stopped by are trying or using Kubernetes for their Rails apps. Others are using App Engine, Cloud Storage or other Google products. This was my third RailsConf since I started at Google, and I'm happy to see that more and more community members are trying Google Cloud products and giving us feedback so we can continue our goal of creating tools that feel good to Rubyists and help them build and run amazing applications.

Open Source at Google I/O 2017

One of the best parts of Google I/O every year is the chance to meet with the developers and community organizers from all over the world. It's a unique opportunity to have candid one-on-one conversations about the products and technologies we all love.

This year, I/O features a Community Lounge for attendees to relax, hangout, and play with neat experiments and games. It also features several mini-meetups during which you can chat with Googlers on a variety of topics.

Chris DiBona and Will Norris from the Google Open Source Programs Office will be around Thursday and Friday to talk about anything and everything open source, including our student outreach programs and the new Google Open Source website. If you're at Google I/O this year, make sure to drop by and say hello. Find dates, times, and other details in the Community Lounge schedule.

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Saddle up and meet us in Texas for OSCON 2017

Program chairs at OSCON 2016, left to right:
Kelsey Hightower, Scott Hanselman, Rachel Roumeliotis.
Photo used with permission from O'Reilly Media.
The Google Open Source team is getting ready to hit the road and join the open source panoply that is Open Source Convention (OSCON). This year the event runs May 8-11 in Austin, Texas and is preceded on May 6-7 by the free-to-attend Community Leadership Summit (CLS).

You’ll find our team and many other Googlers throughout the week on the program schedule and in the expo hall at booth #401. We’ve got a full rundown of our schedule below, but you can swing by the expo hall anytime to discuss Google Cloud Platform, our open source outreach programs, the projects we’ve open-sourced including Kubernetes, TensorFlow, gRPC, and even our recently released open source documentation.

Of course, you’ll also find our very own Kelsey Hightower everywhere since he is serving as one of three OSCON program chairs for the second year in a row.

Are you a student, educator, project maintainer, community leader, past or present participant in Google Summer of Code or Google Code-in? Join us for lunch at the Google Summer of Code table in the conference lunch area on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll discuss our outreach programs which help open source communities grow while providing students with real world software development experience. We’ll be updating this blog post and tweeting with details closer to the date.

Without further ado, here’s our schedule of events:

Monday, May 8th (Tutorials)

Tuesday, May 9th (Tutorials)

Wednesday, May 10th (Sessions)
12:30pm Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in lunch

Thursday, May 11th (Sessions)

We look forward to seeing you deep in the heart of Texas at OSCON 2017!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Google hosts the Apache HBase community at HBaseCon West 2017

We’re excited to announce that Google will host and organize HBaseCon West 2017, the official conference for the Apache HBase community on June 12. Registration for the event in Mountain View, CA is free and the call for papers (CFP) is open through April 24. Seats are limited and the CFP closes soon, so act fast.


Apache HBase is the original open source implementation of the design concepts behind Bigtable, a critical piece of internal Google data infrastructure which was first described in a 2006 research paper and earned a SIGOPS Hall of Fame award last year. Since the founding of HBase, its community has made impressive advances supporting massive scale with enterprise users including Alibaba, Apple, Facebook, and Visa. The community is fostering a rich and still-growing ecosystem including Apache Phoenix, OpenTSDB, Apache Trafodion, Apache Kylin and many others.

Now that Bigtable is available to Google Cloud users through Google Cloud Bigtable, developers have the benefit of platform choices for apps that rely on high-volume and low-latency reads and writes. Without the ability to build portable applications on open APIs,  however, even that freedom of choice can lead to a dead end — something Google addresses through its investment in open standards like Apache Beam, Kubernetes and TensorFlow.

To that end, Google’s Bigtable team has been actively participating in the HBase community. We’ve helped co-author the HBase 1.0 API and have standardized on that API in Cloud Bigtable. This design choice means developers with HBase experience don’t need to learn a new API for building cloud-native applications, ensures Cloud Bigtable users have access to the large Apache Hadoop ecosystem and alleviates concerns about long-term lock-in.

We hope you’ll join us and the HBase community at HBaseCon West 2017. We recommend registering early as there is no registration available on site. As usual, sessions are selected by the HBase community from a pool reflecting some of the world’s largest and most advanced production deployments.

Register soon or submit a paper for HBaseCon — remember, the CFP closes on April 24! We look forward to seeing you at the conference.

By Carter Page and Michael Stack, Apache HBase Project Management Committee members

Dispatches from the latest Mercurial sprints

On March 10th-12th, the Mercurial project held one of its twice-a-year sprints in the Google Mountain View office. Mercurial is a distributed version control system, used by Google, W3C, OpenJDK and Mozilla among others. We had 40 developers in attendance, some from companies with large Mercurial deployments and some individual contributors who volunteer in their spare time.

One of the major themes we discussed was user-friendliness. Mercurial developers work hard to keep the command-line interface backwards compatible, but at the same time, we would like to make progress by smoothing out some rough edges. We discussed how we can provide a better user interface for users to opt-in to without breaking the backwards compatibility constraint. We also talked about how to make Mercurial’s Changeset Evolution feature easier to use.

We considered moving Mercurial past SHA1 for revision identification, to enhance security and integrity of Mercurial repositories in light of recent SHA1 exploits. A rough consensus on a plan started to emerge, and design docs should start to circulate in the next month or so.

We also talked about performance, such as new storage layers that would scale more effectively and work better with clones that only contain a partial repository history, a key requirement for Mercurial adoption in enterprise environments with large repositories, like Google.

If you are interested in finding out more about Mercurial (or perhaps you’d like to contribute!) you can find our mailing list information here.

By Martin von Zweigbergk and Augie Fackler, Software Engineers