Tag Archives: Google Developer Expert

Developers Share How They Build with Google Tools and Bard

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

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

This month, we spoke with several Google Developer Experts to learn more about their path.

Eslam Medhat Fathy

Giza, Egypt

Google Developer Expert, Firebase

Technical and Design Mentor at Google for Startups Accelerator Program

Google Developer Group Organizer

Senior Flutter Developer at Sarmad

Twitter

LinkedIn

YouTube

What Google tools have you used to build?

I have used many tools like Firebase, Flutter, Android, Kotlin, Dart, Assistant, and Bard, of course.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

My favorite tool is Firebase, because of how easy it is to set up and use. It also provides a serverless architecture, easy-to-use services, real-time synchronization, and cross-platform support, among other features. These benefits can help you build robust and scalable applications quickly and easily.

Tell us about something you've built in the past using Google tools.

I have more than 10 apps in the store created in Android native with Kotlin, Flutter and Dart. A few examples are Rehlatech and AzkarApp.

What will you create with Google Bard?

I use Bard every day for generating, debugging, explaining, learning code, and more.

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

I advise everyone about to start their developer journey to:

Start with the basics: It's important to have a solid foundation in programming fundamentals. Learn the basics of a programming language, such as syntax, data types, control structures, and functions.

Practice coding: Practice makes perfect. The more you practice coding, the better you'll become. Start with small projects and gradually move on to more complex projects.

Learn from others: Join online communities, attend meetups, and participate in forums. Learning from others can help you improve your skills.

Read the documentation: Documentation is your friend. Read the documentation of the programming language or tools you're using. It can help you understand how to use them properly and solve problems.

Be patient: Learning to code takes time and patience. Don't get discouraged if you don't understand something right away. Keep practicing and asking questions.

Build projects: Building projects is a great way to learn new skills and apply what you've learned. Start small and gradually build more complex projects.

Stay up-to-date: Technology is constantly evolving. Stay up-to-date on the latest trends and updates in the programming world. Attend conferences, read blogs, and follow experts on social media.

Have fun: Coding should be fun. Don't take it too seriously and enjoy the process of learning and building new things.

Carmen Ansio

Barcelona, Spain

Google Developer Expert, Firebase

Google Developer Expert, Web Technologies

UX Engineer

Twitter

LinkedIn

What Google tools have you used to build?

I have used various Google tools to build projects including Angular, Dart, and Firebase.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

My favorite tool has been Chrome DevTools because of its versatile suite of debugging tools and its network panel, which I often use to optimize web performance. DevTools is an essential part of my daily development process as it allows me to test, experiment, and debug code directly in the browser.

What will you create with Google Bard?

With Google Bard, I plan to develop a Figma plugin for creating dynamic design prototypes. Leveraging the natural language processing and understanding capabilities of Google Bard, the plugin will allow designers to quickly convert textual descriptions into visual design elements. This can significantly streamline the design process, bridging the gap between ideation and visual representation, while enabling non-designers to contribute effectively to the design process.

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

For those beginning their developer journey, my advice would be: Always stay curious and never stop learning. Technology evolves quickly, and it's important to be adaptable. Also, never undervalue the importance of good UI/UX design. It's not only about writing code, but also about creating a great user experience.

Stéphanie Walter

Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Google Developer Expert, Web Technologies

Women Techmakers

UX Researcher & Designer

Twitter

LinkedIn

Front-end

What Google tools have you used to build?

The main tools I use are the Chrome inspect tool and Lighthouse. I’m using Material UI a lot and the M3 design kit for Figma is a great time saver.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

Performance is important where I work, so Lighthouse is definitely in my favorite list. The function to get a quick report, which also shows main accessibility issues, is very nice. Of course it won’t show all accessibility issues, but it’s a good place to start improving a website.

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

Both Lighthouse and the Chrome inspect tool are lifesavers when building websites like my blog. There’s still improvement to be made on some pages on performance, but it’s getting there.

What will you create with Google Bard?

To be honest, it only has been recently made available for my country, so I haven’t had time to really play with it. For now, I use AI chatbots as glorified assistants. English isn’t my native language, so asking such tools to help translate some things and improve grammar in some sentences is very helpful. I might use it to help me with sharing knowledge: to improve my articles, conference slides, and training material.

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

Start with a project you are passionate about, something that would help you, or something you wish existed. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It also doesn’t have to be something that will bring money. And remember, you also don’t have to finish it. It’s nice if you can share it with peers to get feedback but you can also share unfinished projects. It’s all about learning while working on something that you like.But remember to also step away from the computer. Developing should not be your whole life - otherwise, you will burn out really fast.

Source: Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud

Developers Share How They Built Their Careers: From Machine Learning to Cloud

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

Google Developer Student Club Alums Reflect On Their Journey To Google Developer Experts

This month, we spoke with several Google Developer Experts to learn more about their path from being Google Developer Student Clubs leads to connoisseurs of their craft.

Suvaditya Mukherjee

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Google Developer Expert, Machine Learning

GDSC Mukesh Patel School of Technology, Management and Engineering - Mumbai Lead Alumni (2021-2022)

Google Summer of Code Org Admin + ML Research Engineer Intern at Ivy

Research Intern at IIIT-Hyderabad

Twitter

LinkedIn

What are some key skills and knowledge you gained as a Google Developer Student Clubs Lead that helped you excel in your role as a Google Developer Expert?

Every day I spent as a lead was a learning experience, but what stood out to me was the holistic learning opportunities that the program brought. For example, as someone specializing in AI, I never found a need to learn Web Development until I had to help audit and create complex web apps for hosting competitions. Additionally, I learned how to absorb newer technical skills as quickly as possible, which proved to be incredibly valuable over time. I also learned the importance of soft skills, which helped me communicate better with my community. As an expert, it’s important to steward your community, and the leadership skills imparted by the program helped me build a deeper understanding of communication, logistics, and team-building.

What has been the impact of being part of the Google Developer Student Clubs community on your personal and professional growth?

As a Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) Lead, I benefited from participating in networking opportunities with like-minded folks and potential mentors who helped immensely in my journey. They helped shape my technical skills, and improve my soft skills. I also had the opportunity to speak in front of large crowds, develop content, manage teams, and closely understand what makes a community tick. As a GDE, it becomes important to have a pulse on the community's needs and requirements. The GDSC Program taught me how to measure these metrics at a grassroots level. I have had the privilege of working with the most skilled, dedicated, professional – and most importantly – humble folks as part of the GDSC Community. The program allowed me the privilege of communicating and building friendships with awesome people over time.

What Google tools have you used to build?

I have used quite a few Google tools in different projects and endeavors, including but not limited to Firebase, Flutter, and Android for hackathons. I have also made use of the Google Cloud Platform to develop and host scalable backend infrastructures during projects and internships in different places. But my most used tool is TensorFlow.

Which tool has been your favorite? Why?

As an ML Practitioner, TensorFlow and Keras have been a boon to simplify days of work into potentially hours or even minutes. The power it delivers to end-users in the most open and democratic way possible while constantly innovating for newer advances is something I have always appreciated. One of the biggest reasons I love Keras has to be the awesome community around it that welcomes everyone with open arms.

Tell us about something you've built in the past using Google tools.

I have hacked around a few projects over time. The most notable among them was an application I personally call TranscribeMate. Imagine you’re in an ongoing lecture and the professor is going quicker than usual, hindering your ability to take notes. TranscribeMate (built with Flutter, Firebase, and MLKit) allows you to use OCR technology to transcribe notes from simple photos of the classroom blackboard, allow newer annotations as a note-taking application, and save them for later use. This was an application I developed for a college course- but I ended up tweaking it a bit more and making use of it on my personal device as well for more general tasks too.

What will you create with Google Bard?

I have been using Bard for a while now; it has a permanent home on my browser. Bard helps me with random questions I have, and Python-related problems. Bard has helped me find solutions in seconds, compared to hours of work when done through traditional search methods. I have been using Bard's help on several projects I have been working on within my research, in projects at Ivy, and the Keras Team. Stay tuned for what comes next!

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

Seek new experiences to learn. No one can learn by working within a narrow niche. Having a working knowledge of different technologies at once allows you to have a diverse and multi-faceted approach to problem-solving. Optimizations in your systems become far more apparent, and you slowly end up learning how to write better code and design scalable systems with ease. Lastly, find a community. Find like-minded folks, talk to them, share notes on what you're building, and if you find yourself too shy to do so, then try anyway. Start by just showing up for one event near you. Then make it two. Then ask a question. The power of collaborative learning is immeasurable.

Veronica Putri Anggraini

Jakarta, Indonesia

Google Developer Expert, Android

GDSC Semarang State Polytechnic Lead Alumni (2017)

Google Developer Group

Women Techmakers Ambassador

Software Engineer Android, @ eWIDEPLUS

LinkedIn

Medium

Instagram

What are some key skills and knowledge you gained as a Google Developer Student Clubs Lead that helped you excel in your role as a Google Developer Expert?

Through GDSC, I learn a lot about Android technology, practice building Android projects, and do workshops for our members every week. This process improves my technical, writing, problem solving and public speaking skills at the same time. I started presenting as a student with a small group workshop of 5-10 people and grew to speaking in front of 1,000 people. This was also one of the necessary criteria to become a GDE.

Can you share some insights on the impact of being part of the Google Developer Student Clubs community on your personal and professional growth?

Exploring different resources while I was a student helped me develop sample app portfolios. I feel like I actually started my professional career as a curriculum developer and trainer for mobile development. I got an offer when I was a speaker at a tech event that discussed Android technology through the GDSC program. In fact, the CEO immediately offered the position after the event ended.

What Google tools have you used to build?

I have a lot of exploration with Jetpack Compose. I currently work closely with the CameraX, AndroidX Library, Google Analytics and Maps API.

Which tool has been your favorite? Why?

CameraX is one of my favorites, because it automatically manages camera resources and avoids unnecessary background work, so I got better performance.

Tell us about something you've built in the past using Google tools.

At my current company, we build a digital bank app product natively. This allows users to use Liveness as a verified onboarding process, QRPay, personalize promo campaigns, and other financial services that we build using Google tools.

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

Gain experience in dealing with issues in the stack that serve as a focus. Be consistent in learning, and don't give up easily when stuck. In other words, be the person that says: "Challenge Accepted".

You should know that learning together is more fun than learning alone, so join the community and learn everything you need and extend your network.

Anubhav Singh

Prayagraj, India

Google Developer Expert, Firebase

GDSC NSEC Kolkata Lead Alumni (2019-20)

GDG Cloud Kolkata Organizer & TFUG Kolkata Co-Organizer

Co-founder, Dynopii

Twitter

GitHub

Linkborg

What are some key skills and knowledge you gained as a Google Developer Student Clubs Lead that helped you excel in your role as a Google Developer Expert?

A major part of being a Google Developer Student Clubs Lead was to enable growth for those around me by learning together. I would often find myself guiding club members on various fronts – sometimes by taking knowledge-sharing sessions on technical topics, sometimes by diving deep into their projects’ code to help them overcome challenges they were facing and sometimes creating videos or written content for them to be able to follow along later.

Through partaking in these activities, I learned public speaking skills, mentoring, and how to be helpful to others experiencing roadblocks. These skills have proved important in my role as a Google Developer Expert.

What has been the impact of being part of the Google Developer Student Clubs community on your personal and professional growth?

Being a GDSC Lead helped me further steer teams with the same passion I have for building communities. As a GDSC Lead, you get to connect with a lot of amazing people. The community itself is highly diverse and vibrant. When I was organizing a workshop for the club during my time as a GDSC Lead, I was fortunate to meet two individuals who later became the co-founders of my startup. In that same club, three of our members became Google Developer Experts in the fields of their interest. Thus, being a GDSC Lead has had a very positive impact on both my professional and personal growth.

What Google tools have you used to build?

I’ve been working in the software development field for almost 12 years now and have used several Google tools over the years, including some that no longer exist. Some of the currently available tools that I most often work with are:

Google Cloud Platform: Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Workflows, GKE, GCE, App Engine, Vertex AI and other AI based products, etc.

Google Postmaster Tools, Search Console Tools, Analytics, Pagespeed Insights

TensorFlow, Keras

Google Maps API

Firebase

reCaptcha

Which tool has been your favorite? Why?

Firebase, hands down. As someone who loves building solutions that are useful to people, Firebase has been my go-to tool for prototyping solutions and MVPs rapidly. I’ve used it to build some simple tools which have been used by thousands of people over the years - all hosted for free and delivered with blazing speed! Even today, during my sessions as a GDE, I always use Firebase to build the UI part of the demo applications I present during the talk.

Tell us about something you've built in the past using Google tools.

I built Fireshort - a URL shortener solution running purely on Firebase. This project is completely open source and has been used by several companies as a base for their in-house URL shortening needs. I’ve been working on the next version of this project at Linkborg.

I’ve also built several real-time updating monitoring products using Firebase and Pub/Sub, mostly for enterprise clients.

As a proof of concept, I also built KolPay, which is a completely event-driven clone of EasyCard - RFID based payment wallet using Firebase, Pub/Sub, Cloud Firestore and Cloud Functions, along with hardware components like Raspberry Pi, RFID Reader/Card.

What will you create with Google Bard?

Building with Google Bard is an exciting prospect. It will be fun to no longer have to write the repetitive parts of code which I need whenever I am setting up a new project or a module within an existing project. Since I spend a lot of my day coding, I will be very happy to automate parts of it and having an AI do that would be amazing!

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

Starting a developer journey can be a daunting prospect - everyone’s talking about AI and everyone wants to build the next viral thing. If you are new to this field, step back, relax and start building a solution to any problem that has irked you for a long time. While you’re at it - read a lot of tech blogs about solving that problem, become a part of developer communities, either virtual or in person, and meet people who will share their insights about building similar products.

Kartik Derasari

Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud

GDSC Silver Oak University Lead Alumni (2020-2021)

Google Developers Group Cloud Organizer

Full-Stack Engineer at Persistent

Twitter

Linkedin

Instagram

What are some key skills and knowledge you gained as a Google Developer Student Clubs Lead that helped you excel in your role as a Google Developer Expert?

As a GDSC Lead, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with Googlers, Google Developer Experts, and Google Developer Groups Community Leads on various projects which helped me explore different technologies and choose what’s best for me. Knowledge sharing and public speaking is what I learned from the Google Developer Experts. Since then, I started my journey as a Technical Speaker where I share my learnings on Machine Learning & TensorFlow, Web, Firebase, and Google Cloud. I also had the opportunity to share my learnings across conferences like DevFest, Google Cloud Community Days, and GDSC WOW. These are some of the learnings that really helped me shape as a Google Developer Expert and excel in my journey.

Can you share some insights on the impact of being part of the Google Developer Student Clubs community on your personal and professional growth?

Being a GDSC Lead created a positive impact in my personal and professional journey. I came in touch with the tech community and I learned about Google Developer Groups & Google Developer Experts programs. I started volunteering for the GDG Cloud Ahmedabad chapter during my GDSC tenure and later I became one of the Community Organizers. I also started collaborating with Google Developer Experts on Web, Firebase, and Machine Learning projects and made some open-source contributions.

Everyone from the community was so welcoming and helpful. I’d highly recommend everyone join these developer programs by Google and get the best out of it. I also received mentorship from GDG Community Leads and Google Developer Experts for my professional career. They helped me connect with the right set of people and guided me to kick-start my professional career with MediaAgility, which is part of the Google Cloud Partner ecosystem. Since then, I have been working on Web & Google Cloud in my professional capacity and in my personal capacity as well.

I was motivated by the Google Cloud ecosystem in India and I cleared six Google Cloud Certifications, which created a huge impact in my personal and professional growth.

What Google tools have you used to build?

I started using Firebase as a Web Engineer. It has been very helpful when it comes to adding Authentication, storing application data in Firestore, and hosting web-app front-end static files over a CDN using Firebase Hosting. While building a set of web apps, I started exploring Machine Learning and used TensorFlow for building ML models for different use cases. Since then, I started using Google Cloud ML APIs and Cloud Functions for adding more functionalities to my web apps.

While working on these projects, I came across the Google Cloud Partner ecosystem and joined MediaAgility (now part of Persistent Systems) as a Full-Stack Engineer. Since then, I have been working on Google Cloud with Google Cloud PSO and enterprise customers.

Which tool has been your favorite? Why?

Cloud Run is something that I really like as an Application Developer. Since it’s a serverless compute platform, I can spend more time on building my application rather than worrying about my infrastructure. Firebase Authentication, Cloud Firestore, and Cloud Storage are also tools that I really love. They help me create full-stack apps and ship faster to production.

Tell us about something you've built in the past using Google tools. What will you create with Google Bard?

Since we’re in the wave of Generative AI right now, I have been working on building a number of apps using Google Cloud Run, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Generative AI studio, Model Garden on Vertex AI and PaLM models. Recently, I built a chat application interface which provides insights from structured enterprise data warehouse and unstructured files, along with enterprise-grade data governance and security.

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

Be a consistent learner and a persistent explorer. It’s great to cultivate a learning habit, which will help you all the way in your personal and professional journey. This will not only help you explore new things, but it will also help you master something that you really love to do. As a beginner, it would be good to start with something that you find interesting, and then you can add a flavor of other things. For example, if you find building web apps interesting, try it. When you think you’re good at it, you can add a flavor of Machine Learning to it. That’s how you explore new things and experiment with what you know.

Source: Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud

AAPI Heritage Month: How Web GDE Vickie Li views the importance of diversity

Posted by Kevin Hernandez, Developer Relations Community Manager

For AAPI Heritage Month, we are celebrating Vickie Li, Web GDE

Vickie Li, Web GDE, is a Senior Security Engineer at Instacart where she works on a range of security tasks such as bug bounty reports and building internal security tooling. Although she went to school with the goal of becoming a developer, she discovered computer systems and started working on bug bounties as a way of exploring the security industry. From there, her interest in security blossomed and eventually inspired her to blog about security. As Vickie started to become more involved in blogging and sharing what she’s working on or learning, she started to realize that she really enjoyed the sense of community - both in the developer and AAPI communities.

AAPI community support and progress

To Vickie, diversity is important and necessary to inspire the next generation of tech professionals. Having role models that look like you serve as a way to show young professionals or students what is possible. Vickie shares, “For me, being a young Asian woman, it has been difficult to find role models that I can relate to. When I see people like myself excelling in the community, I am motivated to keep pursuing a tech career.” Just recently, Vickie attended a Women Techmakers event at I/O ‘23 where she felt inspired and was able to relate with the speakers who shared a lot of her same characteristics. This made Vickie feel a sense of solidarity and she says, "Meeting other women of AAPI heritage at I/O made me feel less alone on this tech journey. Having this community that I can relate to is helping me chart my career path."

Over the years, Vickie has noticed the tech industry making more of a conscious effort to celebrate and empower different cultures. Her company, for example, has their own way of celebrating AAPI heritage and they have employee groups that are devoted to helping Asian employees feel included and celebrated. This extends beyond the AAPI community and Vickie explains, "Actively recognizing the importance of diversity within the tech industry benefits everyone. Having a foundation of respect and open mindedness encourages innovation and inspires more people to pursue developer careers."

Advice for AAPI developers

Vickie encourages developers to find a relatable mentor to learn from and a mentor that has a shared experience. This allows you to learn from someone who has excelled in the space and have someone that you can personally look up to. She talks about her own personal experience by saying, “One of my earlier mentors in college wasn’t in the tech space but was of an Asian background. Because of that cultural understanding, he was able to help me navigate through a lot of my career difficulties, while also understanding my cultural upbringing and the nuances that may bring.” Vickie goes on to say, “It doesn't just apply to AAPI Heritage impact - it can also apply to if you're a woman, for example. Finding a woman role model to mentor you to help you navigate the tricky parts of the industry.”

Through the Google Developer Expert program, Vickie has seen people just like her excel in their careers and share their experiences through events such as Google I/O. Vickie has been able to meet people with shared experiences and similar backgrounds that show her what is possible in her own career.

You can find Vickie online on her personal site.

The Google Developer Experts (GDE) program is a global network of highly experienced technology experts, influencers, and thought leaders who actively support developers, companies, and tech communities by speaking at events and publishing content.

Source: Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud

How web GDE Erick Wendel forever changed Node.js with the support of the open-source community

Posted by Kevin Hernandez, Developer Relations Community Manager

Have you ever faced bugs on technologies known worldwide? What did you do?

If you are Erick Wendel, Web GDE, you roll up your sleeves and find a solution to a bug that has been plaguing big tech companies.

Erick is a community-driven developer who got his start in the field through a software community that used to offer free courses in his home country of Brazil. This experience sparked a passion for open-source projects and collaboration that helped him solve an issue within Node.js that affected how subprocesses work in the runtime. Erick continued with his spirit of sharing knowledge by outlining exactly how he solved the bug in a detailed YouTube video (in Portuguese).

Erick Wendel, Web GDE, speaking at the FrontInSampa conference

The bug

In Node.js, there’s a module called child process which allows you to create tasks in other functions so you process data in the background. This process harnesses more power from your machine and in web pages, allowing pages to load faster. When trying to import modules in JavaScript, there are two main ways to load those modules:

CommonJS: scripts need to be loaded in a certain sequence. This method blocks the program until all modules are loaded in that sequence.

ECMAScript Modules: allows for JavaScript to load modules asynchronously, thus preventing the blocking of the program as it’s loading files.

While creating an educational class for his students, Erick was using Node.js' child process module and trying to schedule a function that would be executed in the background. Working correctly, the parent process should’ve sent messages to the program running in the background as soon as calling the function. While doing this, he noticed that he was receiving an error and even rewrote his code multiple times. Erick was 100% certain that his code should’ve been working but despite his confidence, he continued to receive an error. So he thought to himself, “What if I put a setTimeout function here just to wait a bit and then ask for the events. Then it worked!” Erick realized this was in fact a real bug and went straight to the Node.js' GitHub repo to open up an issue and worked with other contributors to figure out the best solution.

Finding a solution

After Erick’s Eureka moment, he wanted to be sure that this wasn’t an issue that was only affecting him. “When I Googled this problem, I found these issues on Facebook Jest, Yarn, and other big libraries that anyone running JavaScript might use,” he discovered. As a champion of open-source projects and collaboration, Erick created an issue on Node.js' GitHub and discussed the issue while other contributors also participated.

When asked about the resources he used to fix this bug, Erick quickly mentions the open-source community. He spoke to Anna Henningsen, one of the most important Node.js contributors, in his opinion. His proposed idea was to introduce a new event in the child process module that would’ve alerted users when the event was “ready”. However, as Anna pointed out, this would’ve led to changes that would’ve required the community to learn how to use this new process. Instead she proposed, “What if you just enqueue all the messages and when the child process is ready, you dispatch them all?” This was the kind of collaboration that he strives for and this solution by Anna would’ve fixed the bug without breaking all applications that use Node.js.

Anna offered immense support and immediately after opening the discussion in GitHub, members of the community commented on the project and gave their input. He recalls, “After I submitted the first version of my solution, many contributors were reviewing my code and saying, ‘No, no, this is not the right way, you should fix this, this is a performance problem, etc.’ So I got a lot of feedback, learned a lot, and it was finally approved!” Without the help of the open-source community, he would’ve worked on a solution that would’ve created more issues. Instead, the community pointed out his blind spots and this collaboration allowed for a seamless solution.

With Erick’s solution, Node.js can effectively run background tasks using ECMAScript modules and large companies have Erick and the open-source community to thank for solving an issue that has been around since the beginning of Node.js.

Impact

Since solving this issue, Erick has become a Node.js core member where he reviews pull requests, attends discussions, and is regarded as an influential developer in the space. Erick has also been invited to conferences all around the world to speak about open-source development and his experience.

Erick wants to add visibility to the power of open-source projects and implores everyone, students and professionals alike, to help out with open-source. These projects have helped him with his goals of making an imprint in the world and he states, “I want to put my name on something that people will remember forever. I would say this is the power of open-source. You can add ideas or try fixing something and this can make you a better developer and a better person.”

Erick is continuing to solve problems (his newest solution fixed a bug in Node.js with a single line of code), learn, educate through his YouTube channel, and is looking forward to the next big challenge.

Erick’s thank yous

Erick would like to thank the open-source community and in particular, Anna Henningsen and Rich Trott for their support and contributions to this solution. In his words, "I know that for those experienced Node.js collaborators, this bug would have been fixed in just a matter of minutes and they let me help and give my best. This is a lesson I'll always remember."

You can find Erick on Twitter, GitHub and YouTube where he published a step-by-step tutorial (in Brazilian Portuguese) on how he fixed this bug and also gave a summarized tech talk sharing his journey.

Source: Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud

How Web GDE Martine Dowden approaches web design from an accessibility perspective

Posted by Kevin Hernandez, Developer Relations Community Manager

To celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we interviewed Martine Dowden, Web GDE.

Today’s websites follow certain principles for good web design. Some of these principles include simplicity, F-shaped patterned layouts (how we read content on a page), great content, loading times, color palettes, and more. One principle that might not be top of mind when looking at our favorite sites is accessibility and when applying it to web design, its purpose is to make sites available to everyone. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 16% of the population lives with some kind of disability. In web design, accessibility is about making sure you have enough color contrast, a lower resolution screen, different button sizes, alt text, navigation that can be accessed with your keyboard, descriptive text, and so on. For Web GDE, Martine Dowden, this is something she thinks about everyday. Martine is the CTO of Andromeda Galactic Solutions where she builds sites for her clients with an accessibility approach. Martine is also the co-author of Approachable Accessibility: Planning for Success, which landed her on Book Authority’s 20 Best Accessibility Books of All Time list, and has given numerous talks on the subject.

When asked about why accessibility is important to her, Martine shares, “It affects everybody. I want to make sure that when I'm creating something, it doesn't matter who you are, what device you're on, or what your needs are, you're gonna be able to access it. I don't want to exclude people.” To achieve accessibility, Martine urges designers and developers to think about accessibility principles as early as possible. She goes on to say that if your mockups are already inaccessible, you’re setting yourself up for failure. She compares accessibility to security and explains, “I like to parallel it to security because you can't accidentally do security correctly. Accessibility is the same way. You have to actually think about it and test for it.” For testing accessibility early on, Martine recommends using automated tools such as Lighthouse, which has an accessibility checker. However, while automated tools are helpful, it only catches a small subset of what is accessible on your site. Martine explains that automated tools don’t really understand context. “The automated tooling will tell me if I have alt text or not but it won't tell me if that alt text is relevant or helpful. If I'm showing a picture of cats and my alt text says it's a picture of dogs, the automated tooling will say it’s good to go,” she points out. While it’s helpful to have this automation, Martine recommends coupling these tools with a manual review in order to be thorough while testing for accessibility.

Martine also recommends Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which is the international standard. This resource provides specs and a lot of supporting documentation that explains why the specs exist, but it is an exhaustive resource that Martine doesn’t recommend reading from beginning to end. Instead, Martine suggests using it when you have a certain question and looking up the specific specs. Another technology that assists her in her work is Angular since the UI library includes the accessibility notes.

The importance of accessibility is clear when it comes to giving everyone access to web sites and with 71% of users with disabilities clicking away from sites due to inaccessibility, an accessibility approach is vital. Accessibility might be something new to you as a designer or developer but as with everything else, Martine suggests, “It's just like learning any other skill, take it bit by bit and you'll eventually get there. Everybody has to start somewhere.”

You can find Martine online on her personal site.

Source: Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud

Yonatan Levin, Android GDE, uses his developer superpowers to help refugees in Ukraine

Posted by Kevin Hernandez, Developer Relations Community Manager

Yonatan Levin, R&D Tech Lead, Monday.com

Initial reaction to the news

At the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Android GDE Yonatan Levin was confused. He started his day just like any other - with exercise and a book - but on the day of the invasion, his phone was bombarded with text messages from friends, relatives, and coworkers. Normally a hard worker, Yonatan tried to go into work but as he sat at his desk, he had a distracting thought in the front of his mind. He recounts, “I was staring at my monitor and in my head, all I kept repeating was, ‘I have to do something, I have to do something.’” He messaged coworkers about the situation to see what they could do and eventually, the leadership of his or gave Yonatan their blessing to go to the Ukraine / Poland border and help the refugees. Yonatan and his friends immediately packed their bags and set out to Poland.

Arriving at the border

Yonatan and his friends landed and immediately drove 6 hours from Warsaw to the border where camps organized by volunteers were located. When he got there, he and his friends felt immediate shock. They saw thousands of refugees crammed in a small space with their whole lives packed into bags. His feeling of shock quickly wore off as he saw the unorganized volunteer efforts; he started focusing on ways to support relief efforts as a developer.

Yonatan noticed that there were volunteers arriving from all over Europe to offer free rides, accommodation, or even work opportunities. However, there was little technology being used - volunteers held up signs with locations they were driving to. The current matchmaking process was inefficient, so he decided to build an Android app and a solution on top of monday.com (an all-in-one work management software) where volunteers with cars and refugees registered online and were matched based on where they needed to go.

Using technology to turn chaos into order

Just like any new idea or a startup, Yonatan’s group went through iterations before they had a solution that truly worked. To replace the cardboard signs that volunteer drivers held up, Yonatan and his friends bought laptops and a TV so they could display a list of drivers and their destinations. Then, they matched refugees with volunteer drivers - but this proved to be a manual solution. They offered this solution to other camps but when they came back to the original site, they found that the laptops were closed and volunteers reverted back to the old system of holding up cardboard signs. This was a sign to go back to the drawing board to create something that would stick.

While the laptops and TV screens helped, there were still large queues at the camps as busloads of refugees came in every few minutes. With monday.com, they created a registration form for the refugees and a completely new process. Once refugees arrived at the camp, they received a wristband with a QR code, registered their names, and selected what they needed: food, sim cards, a bed, a ride to a different city, etc. This new process took just 10 minutes and they built a dashboard to keep track of data in order to dedicate resources where they were needed. For example, if the most in-demand destination was Warsaw, volunteers knew to recruit more drivers heading there.

Yonatan and his friends were able to pull off the impressive feat of developing an entire Android app with 3rd party APIs integrations for driver verification and a core database with monday.com in just one night. “To build an app in one night is amazing. You can not easily do this with other platforms,” he observed. This was a turning point for the camps and volunteer organizers embraced this system.

Reflecting a year later

Yonatan hopes to inspire others through his experience. “This is something that happened very close to me. If I did something about it, I hope others know they can help too,” he urges. He expanded the system to other camps and remembers one of the organizers beaming that it was the best software they have ever used. Yonatan and his colleagues used their expertise to help refugees get to safety and he reflects on being a developer by saying, “It is a power that we developers have - to identify a huge pain and solve it with relatively minimal effort, sometimes in a matter of hours. This is a super power.”

Yonatan’s motto is to help in any way you can. He encourages other developers, “Things happen everywhere, all the time. Do not distance yourself from the struggles of others. Instead, search for ways you can help them.” Due to the changing environment, the app is not being used today but countless refugees were driven to safety thanks to Yonatan's developer superpowers.

You can find Yonatan on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Source: Google Developers Blog

GDE Women’s History Month Feature: Jigyasa Grover, Machine Learning

Posted by Kevin Hernandez, Developer Relations Community Manager

For Women’s History Month, we are celebrating Jigyasa Grover, ML GDE.

Photo of Jigyasa Grover, holding a cup of coffee, smiling

Jigyasa Grover, ML GDE, Senior ML Engineer, Twitter

Jigyasa Grover is a 10x award winner in AI and open source, a published book author in machine learning, and was most recently named one of the 50 most powerful women in technology to follow for 2023. Jigyasa has always been inspired by technology – with her father being a computer scientist for the government of India and playing with a toy laptop as a child. Google has also played an integral role in her career by providing resources and community every step of the way: from early in her university days through Google Summer of Code to today, where she is a Senior ML Engineer at Twitter and leverages the Women Techmakers and Google Developer Experts programs to connect with other developers and pay it forward through programs like Google Code-In.

Getting involved in the developer community

Things started rolling for Jigyasa in her first year at university when she discovered Pharo at the library, where she spent a lot of her time. As she started to dive deeper into Pharo, she read more and more about the open source community and eventually started reaching out to members of the community online. This led her to discover Google Summer of Code, an open source internship, where she was selected to participate as one of the youngest developers. After a successful stint in the program, Jigyasa was invited to participate again the following year, which proved to be a pivotal moment in her academic career. Up to this point, Jigyasa was working primarily on mobile and web app development. “The second year, the project that I was working on was more focused on building web scrapers, machine learning, NLP chatbots, and so on. That was my introduction to the world of machine learning which got me intrigued”, Jigyasa says. After this experience she started taking more courses related to machine learning, watched talks, worked on more machine learning projects, and interned at the National Research Council of Canada and then the Institute Research and Development in France. These experiences helped shape her career vision and she knew that machine learning would be her field of expertise.

Finding community through Google

Up until college, Jigyasa had always gone to all-girls schools so when she first got to engineering school, it was an eye-opening experience for her. She reflects, “I felt like a minority coming from a place where I was surrounded by girls all the time. That's when I started Googling different organizations and found organizations like Women Who Code, Women Techmakers, and Google Developer Groups.” These organizations exposed her to mentorship, resources, and events, and more. One such event was Google I/O, where she was invited to attend online. Many developer events reminded her of the lack of women's representation in the developer community. This inspired her to commit to the saying, "be the change you want to see in the world." Jigyasa would go on to pursue speaking opportunities at tech events and inspire other women developers with her passion and support.

After university, Jigyasa discovered the GDE program and the strong community the program offers. Jigyasa adds, “I think one of the most meaningful parts of the program is the community. I like how different Google programs cater to different kinds of audiences. For example, when I became a GDE, I was a part of the wider developer community but also connected with developers in my field of expertise - machine learning.” Jigyasa appreciates being able to interact with people in her field and is motivated by being surrounded by like-minded people. She has even been a guest on another GDE’s YouTube channel and was also given a chance to connect with Laurence Moroney, Lead AI Advocate at Google, who wrote the foreword for her book. Jigyasa credits Google developer programs for developing her career and expertise, “All of these programs have brought me great opportunities. Summer of Code, Google Developers Groups, Women Techmakers, and now GDE. All these programs have been so important in my journey and I'm forever grateful to them.”

Inspiration and advice

As an award winner and influencer in technology, Jigyasa is a role model for other women and is committed to helping women developers in their careers. She says, “It has definitely been a journey. From being involved in these communities, giving talks in numerous countries and cities. It's just been a domino effect.” In addition to speaking events, Jigyasa has published content, mentored through Google programs and has even designed curriculums at local colleges in the Bay Area.

Jigyasa urges other women developers to pursue opportunities for development and connection. Jigyasa has accomplished a lot in her career by reaching out to her communities and by saying yes to challenging opportunities. She is committed to supporting more women in their developer journey and driving representation in the field of machine learning.

You can find Jigyasa on LinkedIn, Twitter, or her personal site.

Source: Google Developers Blog

Lynn Langit: Turning a passion for learning into online courses viewed by millions

Posted by Kevin Hernandez, Developer Relations Community Manager

Lynn Langit is not only a Cloud GDE - she’s one of the first ever GDEs to join the program. Despite joining the GDE program early after its establishment, she got a relatively late start with development. Lynn is a self-taught developer that started coding when she was 38 years old - before we had the advent of online educational resources that we do today. To teach herself how to code, she relied on certifications and books and went to her local electronics store to buy equipment to build her own server. Through this process, she found that she was a talented developer and became inspired to try her hand at teaching. She started out with teaching basic topics such as user applications. Today she has 28 Cloud courses on LinkedIn and has an audience of 5 million students. With this immense reach, Lynn runs into her students at various conferences around the world and has even had students recognize her from her voice. She mentions,“Before the pandemic, I used to travel and work globally and it was so gratifying to meet all my students because they would want to come and talk to me. It was incredible to meet students from all over the world.”

Getting into teaching

When Lynn left her corporate job, she started her own consultancy in 2011 with two ideas: technical teaching and building. She started out in a classroom with these two ideas but as traditional learning started to usher in a new era of online learning, Lynn followed suit and started to put her lessons on YouTube. This caught the attention of Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) where she was asked to become an author.

Teaching has proven to be rewarding in several ways. It allows Lynn to have an impact on learners interested in Cloud and dive deeper into topics she’s interested in, all while getting paid for her academic pursuits and instructing. She states, “I can't say I'm an expert in all the services, but I know a lot of the services across all the Clouds. So while I'm learning, I might as well teach and get paid for it.”

Choosing lessons

Lynn is in the constant pursuit for knowledge and in the ever-changing world of Cloud, there is always something new to learn or teach and in Lynn’s case, both. “Oftentimes I'll create a course in something that I am genuinely interested in that doesn’t have an existing course. It's so that I can focus my energies, learn it, and then teach it,” she adds. A recent example is with a book club she led last year in quantum computing. “I'm just really taking baby steps into it and as part of that, I started exploring the vendor Cloud quantum offerings. Then I decided to share that as a course,” she says.

She also mentions that there is a preconceived notion that online content has to be super polished. She believes it’s important to put your lessons out there and more importantly, to learn together. “We're one community and we need to share when we discover something,” she observed.

Teaching style

Every instructor has their own teaching style and for Lynn, her brand is a conversational style of instruction. Very much like our interview, her lessons feel as if she’s talking to the audience one-on-one. This is in part by design - Lynn doesn’t write a script and she imagines someone sitting across from her. She can also sprinkle in some useful case studies from her consultancy work and can draw from some real-world examples.

When asked about effective educators, Lynn says, “Don't be a jerk. The point is not to show how smart you are. The point is to communicate information that you have found useful, that you think other people will find useful and in a way they can understand.”

Advice for educating online

Lynn has met a lot of educators in her career and has had the fortune of being able to see published and unpublished content. One thing she noticed is that the problem with a lot of content is that it just simply doesn’t see the light of the day. Some content creators feel as if there is a missing piece or their content needs to be ultra polished but Lynn’s advice is to just click “publish”. She also notes that this can be attributed to imposter syndrome, which shows emotional intelligence, but as a counterpoint she advises, “There's value in the learning, not just the result. That is probably the biggest insight I've gained over my years because I always thought you just had to show polished content.” Lynn believes that your audience wants to go along with you on your journey and since people are busy, they think of you as a curator of knowledge.

She also advises to start small. She is particularly fond of “snack-sized” pieces of content such as the short-form articles on Dev.to. These “snacks” are easier to produce and in reality, it’s easier on the audience. She says, “It's funny because people want to make a course but this is not a Hollywood movie, I am sorry to break it to you, but people are not going to be rapturously glued to your screen for two hours no matter who you are. So just make little snacks.” If you find something interesting, just put it out there. Over time, as you get practice, you can start to produce longer-form content.

Advice for GDEs

Lynn offers valuable advice to any present or future GDE. She encourages, “Really get to know the GDEs. We're all kind of doing the same thing and just jump right in. The bar is high to become a GDE and it's a great community that I've learned a lot from.” There is a wealth of knowledge offered by your community. Maybe you’ll learn how to create an Android app, build a ML model, or build an online course with the guidance of Lynn. Just jump right in.

You can check out Lynn’s LinkedIn courses or find her on LinkedIn or Substack.

Source: Google Developers Blog

GDE community highlight: Lars Knudsen

Posted by Monika Janota, Community Manager

Lars Knudsen is a Google Developer Expert; we talked to him about how a $10 device can make computers more accessible for people with disabilities.

Monika: What inspired you to become a developer? What’s your current professional focus?

Lars: I got my MSc in engineering, but in fact my interest in tech started much earlier. When I was a kid in the 80s, my father owned a computing company working with graphic design. Sometimes, especially during the summer holidays, he would take me to work with him. At times, some of his employees would keep an eye on me. There was this really smart guy who once said to me, “Lars, I need to get some work done, but here's a C manual, and there’s a computer over there. Here’s how you start a C compiler. If you have any questions, come and ask me.” I started to write short texts that were translated into something the computer could understand. It seemed magical to me. I was 11 years old when I started and around seventh grade, I was able to create small applications for my classmates or to be used at school. That’s how it started.

Over the years, I’ve worked for many companies, including Nokia, Maersk, and Openwave. At the beginning, like in many other professions, because you know a little, you feel like you can do everything, but with time you learn each company has a certain way of doing things.

After a few years of working for a medical company, I started my own business in 1999. I worked as a freelance contractor and, thanks to that, had the chance to get to know multiple organizations quickly. After completing the first five contracts, I found out that every company thinks they’ve found the perfect setup, but all of them are completely different. At that time, I was also exposed to a lot of different technologies, operating systems etc. Around my early twenties, my mindset changed. At the beginning, I was strictly focused on one technology and wanted to learn all about it. With time, I started to think about combining technologies as a way of improving our lives. I have a particular interest in narrowing the gap between what we call the A and the B team in the world. I try to transfer as much knowledge as possible to regions where people don’t have the luxury of owning a computer or studying at university free of charge.

I continue to work as a contractor for external partners but, whenever possible, I try to choose projects that have some kind of positive impact on the environment or society. I’m currently working on embedded software for a hearing-aid company called Oticon. Software-wise, I’ve been working on everything from the tiniest microcontrollers to the cloud; a lot of what I do revolves around the web. I’m trying to combine technologies whenever it makes sense.

Monika: Were you involved in developer communities before joining the Google Developer Experts program?

Lars: Yes, I was engaged in meetups and conferences. I first connected with the community while working for Nokia. Around 2010, I met Kenneth Rohde Christiansen, who became a GDE before me. He inspired me to see how web technologies can be useful for aspiring tech professionals in developing countries. Developing and deploying solutions using C++, C# or Java requires some years of experience, but everyone who has access to a computer, browser, and notepad can start developing web-based applications and learn really fast. It’s possible to build a fully functional application with limited resources, and ramp up from nothing. That’s why I call the web a very democratizing technology stack.

But back to the community—after a while I got interested in web standardization and what problems bleeding edge web technologies could solve. I experimented with new capabilities in a browser before release. I was working for Nokia at the time, developing for a Linux-based flagship device, the N9. The browser we built was WebKit based and I got some great experience developing features for a large open source project. In the years after leaving Nokia, I got involved in web conferences and meetups, so it made sense to join the GDE community in 2017.

I really enjoy the community work and everything we’re doing together, especially the pre-pandemic Chrome Developer Summits, where I got to help with booth duty alongside a bunch of awesome Google Engineers and other GDEs.

Monika: What advice would you give to a young developer who’s just starting their professional career and is not sure which path to take?

Lars: I’d say from my own experience—if you can afford it—consider freelancing for a couple of different companies. This way, you’ll be exposed to code in many different forms and stages of development. You’ll get to know a multitude of operating systems and languages, and learn how to resolve problems in many ways. This helped me a lot. I gained experience as senior developer in my twenties. This approach will help you achieve your professional goals faster.

Besides that, have fun, explore, play with the hardware and software. Consider building something that solves a real problem—maybe for your friends, family, or a local business. Don’t be afraid to jump into something you’ve never done before.

Monika: What does the future hold for web technologies?

Lars: I think that for a couple of years now the web has been fully capable of providing a platform for large field applications, both for the consumer and for business. On the server side of things, web technologies offer a seamless experience, especially for frontend developers who want to build a backend component. It’s easier for them to get started now. I know people who were using both Firebase and Heroku to get the job done. And this trend will grow—web technologies will be enough to build complex solutions of any kind. I believe that the Web Capabilities - Project Fugu ? really unlocks that potential.

Looking at it from a slightly different point of view, I also think that if we provide full documentation and in-depth articles not only in English but also in other languages (for example, Spanish and Portuguese), we would unlock a lot of potential in Latin America—and other regions, of course. Developers there often don’t know English well enough to fully understand all the relevant articles. We should also give them the opportunity to learn as early as possible, even before they start university, while still in their hometowns. They may use those skills to help local communities and businesses before they leave home and maybe never come back.

Thomas: You came a long way from doing C development on a random computer to hacking on hardware. How did you do that?

Lars: I started taking apart a lot of hardware I had at home. My dad was not always happy when I couldn’t put it back together. With time, I learned how to build some small devices, but it really took off much later, around the time I joined Nokia, where I got my embedded experience. I had the chance to build small screensavers, components for the Series 30 phones. I was really passionate about it and could really think outside the box. They assigned me a task to build a Snake game for those devices. It was a very interesting experience. The main difference between building embedded systems and most other things (including web) is that you leave a small footprint—you don’t have much space or memory to use. While building Snake, the RAM that I had available was less than one-third of the frame buffer (around 120 x 120 pixels). I had to come up with ways to algorithmically rejoin components on screen so they’d look static, as if they were tiles. I learned a lot—that was the move from larger systems to small, embedded solutions.

Thomas: The skill set of a typical frontend developer is very different from the skill set of someone who builds embedded hardware. How would you encourage a frontend developer to look into hardware and to start thinking in binary?

Lars: I think that the first step is to look at some of the Fugu APIs that work in Chrome and Edge, and are built into all the major systems today. That’s all you need at the start.

Another thing is that the toolchains for building embedded solutions have a steep learning curve. If you want to build your own custom hardware, start with Arduino or ESP32—something that is easy to buy and fairly cheap. With the right development environment, you can get your project up and running in no time.

You could also buy a heart rate monitor or a multisensor unit, which are already using Bluetooth GATT services, so you don’t have to build your own hardware or firmware—you can use what’s already there and start experimenting with the Web Bluetooth API to start communicating with it.

There are also devices that use a serial protocol—for these, you can use the Web Serial API (also Fugu). Recently I’ve been looking into using the WebHID API, which enables you to talk to all the human interface devices that everyone has access to. I found some old ones in my basement that had not been supported by any operating system for years, but thanks to reverse engineering it took me a few hours to re-enable them.

There are different approaches depending on what you want to build, but to a web developer I would say, get a solid sensor unit, maybe a Thingy 52 from Nordic Semiconductor; it has a lot of sensors, and you can hook up to your web application with very little effort.

Thomas: Connecting to the device is the first step, but then speaking to it effectively—that’s a whole other thing. How come you did not give up after facing obstacles? What kept you motivated to continue working?

Lars: For me personally the social aspect of solving a problem was the most important. When I started working on my own embedded projects, I had a vision and a desire to build a science lab in a box for developing regions. My wife is from Mexico and I saw some of the schools there; some that are located outside of the big cities are pretty shabby, without access to the materials and equipment that we have in our part of the world.

The passion for building something that can potentially be used to help others—that’s what kept me going. I also really enjoyed the community support. I reached out to some people at Google and all were extremely helpful and patiently answered all of my questions.

Thomas: A lot of people have some sort of hardware at home, but don’t know what to do with it. How do you find inspiration for all your amazing projects, in particular the one under the working name SimpleMouse?

Lars: Well, recently I have been in fact reviving a lot of old hardware, but for this particular project—the name has not been set yet, but let’s call it SimpleMouse—I used my experience. I worked with some accessibility solutions earlier and I saw how some of them just don’t work anymore; you’d need to have an old Windows XP with certain software installed to run them. You can’t really update those, you can only use those at home because you can’t move your setup.

Because of that, I wondered how to combine my skills from the embedded world with project Fugu and what is now possible on the web to create cheap, affordable hardware combined with easy-to-understand software on both sides, so people can build on that.

For that particular project, I took a small USB dongle with a reflexive chip, the nRF52840. It communicates with Bluetooth on one side and USB on the other. You can basically program it to be anything on both sides. And then I thought about the devices that control a computer—a mouse and a keyboard. Some people with disabilities may find it difficult to operate those devices, and I wanted to help them.

The first thing I did was to make sure that any operating system would see the USB dongle as a mouse. You can control it from a native application or a web application—directly into Bluetooth. After that, I built a web application—a simple template that people can extend the way they want using web components. Thanks to that, everyone can control their computer with a web app that I made in just a couple of hours on an Android phone.

Having that set up will enable anyone in the world with some web experience to build, in a matter of days, a very customized solution for anyone with a disability who wants to control their computer. The cool thing is that you can take it with you anywhere you go and use it with other devices as well. It will be the exact same experience. To me, the portability and affordability of the device are very important because people are no longer confined to using their own devices, and are no longer limited to one location.

Thomas: Did you have a chance to test the device in real life?

Lars: Actually during my last trip to Mexico I discussed it with a web professional living there; he’s now looking into the possibilities of using the device locally. Over there the equipment is really expensive, but a USB dongle normally costs around ten US dollars. He’s now checking if we could build local setups there to try it out. But I haven’t done official trials yet here in Denmark.

Thomas: Many devices designed to assist people with disabilities are really expensive. Are you planning on cooperating with any particular company and putting it into production for a fraction of the price of that expensive equipment?

Lars: Yes, definitely! I’ve already been talking to a local hardware manufacturer about that. Of course, the device won’t replace all those highly specialized solutions, but it can be the first step to building something bigger—for example, using voice recognition, already available for web technologies. It’ll be an easy way of controlling devices using your Android phone; it can work with a device of any kind.

Just being able to build whatever you want on the web and to use that to control any host computer opens up a lot of possibilities.

Thomas: Are you releasing your Zephyr project as open source? What kind of license do you use? Are there plans to monetize the project?

Lars: Yes, the solution is open source. I did not put a specific license on it, but I think Apache 2.0 would be the way to go. Many major companies use this license, including Google. When I worked on SimpleMouse, I did not think about monetizing the project—that was not my goal. But I also think it would make sense to try to put it into production in some way, and with this comes cost. The ultimate goal is to make it available. I’d love to see it being implemented at a low cost and on a large scale.

Source: Google Developers Blog

From a personal notebook to 100k YouTube subscriptions: How Carlos Azaustre turned his notes into a YouTube channel

Posted by Kevin Hernandez, Developer Relations Community Manager

Carlos Azaustre, smiling while holding his Silver Button Creator Award from YouTube

Carlos Azaustre with his Silver Button Creator Award from YouTube

When Carlos Azaustre, Web Technologies GDE, finished university, he started a blog to share his personal notes and learnings to teach others about Angular and JavaScript. These personal notes later evolved into tutorials that then turned into a blossoming YouTube channel with 105k subscriptions at the time of this writing. With his 10 years of experience as a Telecommunications Engineer focused on front end development, he has a breadth of experience that he shares with his viewers in a sea of competing content currently on YouTube. Carlos has successfully created a channel focused on technical topics related to JavaScript and has some valuable advice for those looking to educate on the platform.

How he got started with his channel

Carlos started his blog with the primary mission of using it as a personal notebook that he could reference in the future. As he wrote increasingly, he started to notice that people were coming across his notebooks and sharing with others. This inspired him to record tutorials based on the topics of his blogs, but when he was beginning to record these tutorials, a secondary mission came to fruition: he wanted to make technical content accessible to the Spanish-speaking community. He reflects, “In the Spanish community, English is difficult for some people, so I started to create content in Spanish to eliminate barriers for people who are interested in learning new technologies. Learning new things is hard, but it’s easier when it’s in your natural language.”

In the beginning of his YouTube journey, he used the platform for side projects and would post irregularly. Then, 2 years ago, he started putting more effort into creating new content and started to post one video a week while promoting on social media. This change sparked more comments, and his view and total subscribers increased in tandem.

Tips and tricks he’s applied to his channel

Carlos leverages analytics data to adjust his strategy. He explains, “YouTube provides a lot of analytics tools to see if people are engaging and when they leave the video. So you can adjust your content and the timing (video length) because the timing is important.” The data taught Carlos that longer videos generally don’t do as well. He learned the ideal video length for lecture videos where he’s primarily speaking is about 6-8 minutes. But when it comes to tutorials, videos that are about 40 - 60 minutes in length tend to get more views.

Carlos has also taken advantage of YouTube Shorts, a short-form video-sharing platform. “I started to see that Shorts are great to increase your reach because the algorithm pushes your content to people who aren’t subscribed to your channel,” he pointed out. He recommends using YouTube Shorts as an effective way of getting started. When asked about other resources, Carlos mentioned that he primarily draws from his own experience but also turns to books and blogs to help with his channel and to stay up to date with technology.

Choosing video topics

Creating fresh weekly content can be a challenge. To address this, Carlos keeps a notebook of ideas and inspiration for his next videos. For example, he may come across a problem that lacks a clear solution at work and will jot this down. He also keeps track of articles or other tutorials that he feels can either be explained in a more straightforward way or can be translated into Spanish.

Carlos also draws inspiration from the comment section of his videos. He engages with his audience to show there is a real person behind the videos that can guide them. He adds, “this is one of the parts I like the most. They propose new ideas for content that I might’ve missed”.

Advice for starting a channel on technical topics

Carlos’ advice for people looking to start a channel based on technical content is simple: just get started. “If you’re creating great content, people will eventually reach you,” he comments. When he first started his channel, Carlos wasn’t preoccupied with the number of views, comments, or subscriptions. He started his content with himself in mind and would ask himself what kind of content he would want to see. He says, “As long as you’re engaged with the community, you’ll have a great channel. If you try to optimize the content for the algorithm, you’re going to go crazy.” He recommends new content creators start with YouTube Shorts, and once they gain an audience they can create more detailed videos.

It’s also necessary to spark conversation in the comments, and one way you can achieve this is through the title and description of your video. A great title that catches the attention of the viewer, sparks conversation, and implements keywords is essential. A simple way to do this is by asking a question in the title. For example, one of his videos is titled, “How do Promises and Async / Await function in JavaScript?” and also asks a question in the description. This video alone has 250+ comments with viewers answering the question posed by the title and the description. He’s also mindful of what keywords he’s including in his title and finds these keywords by looking at the most popular content with similar topics.

When asked about gear and equipment recommendations, he states that the most important piece of equipment is your microphone, since your voice can be more important than the image, especially if you’re filming a tutorial video. He goes on, “With time, you can update your setup. Maybe your camera is next and then the lighting. Start with your phone or your regular laptop - just start!”

So remember to just get started, and maybe in time, you’ll become the next big content creator for Machine Learning, Google Cloud, Android, or Web Technologies.

You can check out Carlos’ YouTube Channel, find him live on Twitch, or follow him on Twitter or Instagram.