Google Io Connect Berlin 2024

Invitation

A perk of being part of the GDE program is the opportunity to be invited to events organized by Google. I had been in program since September 2023 and John Kimani gave us the good news back in March 2024 and kick off all the procedures to attend IO connect Berlin.

Expectations

I had attended two international conferences previously in Prague and Amsterdam, so I had an idea more or less what to expect. Despite that, I was surprised at the scale and organization of the event.

It’s quite different from a conference focused on a single tech, like JavaScript, compared to a single company operating in various fields and trying to achieve some kind of global goal. You can see very independent teams of amazing engineers working on separate projects, but all of it converging towards a common underlying goal: push the boundaries of technology.

Organization

The conference was very well organized with different tracks, which made it quite easy to pick what to attend. My obvious choice was The Web XXXX, and boy did they deliver!

Theme

It is of no surprise the general theme for the event revolved around AI. Google has been developing and pushing AI around the Gemini brand, and we can now see the different levels where this is being applied.

The most popular use of generative ai technology has been chatbots so far. We can see these chat interfaces showing up in a lot of very different places, gaining access to a local context to be able to help developers get more accurate results with minimal effort.

It appears that it will no longer be required to copy and paste your stuff in Gemini or ChatGPT but rather having them present right where you’re operating: browser, DevTools, terminal, desktop?

AI is not longer the product, but rather it’s becoming a feature of existing products.

My personal highlights

What’s new is the web

The very first session, I was shocked to see Bramus Van Dam and Una Kravets walk up to the stage right in front of me. I had my few seconds of fanboy moment and seized the opportunity to ask a question from the audience.

DevTools

The next talk was equally impressive, with Jecelyn and Daniel running the show. She usually shows up in my DevTools panel with the latest news, and this time it was in person. So cool!

Lunch and catchup

After two sessions it was time to grab lunch at the large demo area and that went smoothly! I ran into JoKi, GDE & Organizer at MSCC and his family, and we hung out for a moment. There were baristas serving coffee and good food all around ^^

Office hours

Every attendee had the opportunity to schedule a 15mins segment with Googlers for a specific topic. I went for it and of course my topic was CSS and Web UI scheduled for 14:50. After attending the Angular Q&A session I rushed to table 15 was shocked to see Una Kravets AND Rachel Andrew there.

Took a moment to gather myself and let the previous attendees finish his session with them, and then I sat down.

At this point, I realized I didn’t think of any questions. So I went for a conversation "in the moment". I introduced myself and asked about :

1. Their teams, who builds these things that we as developers get to use and how are those teams structured.
2. Underused features of the platform and how they are tracked

At this point, just this segment made the whole trip worth it.

Meeting an OG frontend coders member

I then spotted Akasha in the crowd, and we caught up on life after a long time. It's amazing to see her doing so well ! I got a few tips on what to do during my 2 free days in the city, and she also introduced me to some awesome people who were attending the conference.

Web Meetup

The meetup was the last session of the day and it’s a refreshing format. Jocelyn and Daniel from the dev tools teams basically kicked off the session by asking us how we use dev tools and what features would we like to have.

Which in itself is mind-blowing. This is the actual Chrome DevTools lead and PM.

So of course the requests came flying in!

My request/question was about clutter in the dev tools and if there’s any plan to manage that. This led to an interesting discussion about having different modes of dev tools where only some stuff would be shown to make the UI more visually pleasing or and having reduced cognitive load.

Conclusion

This Google event was truly a golden opportunity for networking and meeting people who excel at what they do. You realize that everyone present here have put in the effort in their own fields, and they are, each, a whole encyclopedia with different life experiences. The diversity is certainly something to be applauded, and I left lucky to be among these awesome people building the web together.