Photo taken on September 10, 2019 at the Opening keynote speech of GDD at Shanghai World Expo Center

This year, I was lucky to be selected by the Organizing committee of Google Developer Conference as one of the guests with admission qualifications. On the night of September 9, I flew from Shenzhen to Shanghai. This is my first time in Shanghai and my first time at a developer conference.

I have gained a lot in these two days. Here are my most impressive experiences and some of my personal thoughts.

Arts and Culture

View wonderful Chinese

Google Art & Culture team works with more than 30 museums and art and cultural institutions in China, using technology and creativity to make every art and culture lover in any corner of the world able to enjoy the valuable works of art and historical relics online anytime, anywhere, and experience the fascinating stories behind each treasure.

The 2018 GDD opened with “Picture-guessing song”, while this year’s was “Watch Second China”. You can get up close and personal with works of art that you would have to run your legs off to see in real life. You can zoom in and even see the texture details.

The APP offers three functions:

  1. Zoom in for ultra hd images: A closer look at China’s art treasures.
  2. Virtual reality tour: Explore China’s top museums and hottest art landmarks without leaving home.
  3. Online exhibitions: Enjoy the wonderful exhibitions created by experts anytime and anywhere.

Not everyone has the energy to go to museums in different places. This APP makes art works online, which is convenient for everyone to understand art and also conducive to the propaganda of Chinese art.

The combination of TensorFlow and Traditional Chinese culture

There are 3 art and cultural experience projects combined with AI in the experience area:

  1. Shadow play: hand shadow play, identify successful hand shadow will be converted to animation.
  2. Wisdom drawing oracle bones: drawing oracle bones. After successful identification, the oracle bones drawn will be animated and displayed on the screen.
  3. Dance of wisdom kiln: the porcelain on the screen will show different shapes according to different body features generated by gestures.

There were so many people in line on the first day that I tried everything the next day. Among them, “wisdom drawing oracle-bone” I think the most interesting, the big screen is everyone drawing monkeys, elephants and other animals running around. 🌝

Career Development Section

One of the GDD’s main themes this year is “Women Will”, and a female Android robot can be seen at the gate. This year’s GDD conference launched two global projects:

  1. #IamRemarkableCareer Development Courses
  2. Women developers Panel

Due to Codelabs, Iam sorry to have missed the #IamRemarkable Career development course.

The women’s Developer Panel’s agenda is titled “Tap Your Career Potential — Carve your Own Path,” and it brought together four leading women inside and outside Google to discuss their career challenges.

How to move up in your career?

You don’t have to do anything special, but you do have to be focused and responsible.

  • Always ask yourself: Why are you doing this? How do you do it again? And get things done after reflection.
  • Everyone must be entrepreneurial: the difference between an entrepreneur and a worker is initiative. Entrepreneurs take the initiative to work for themselves, while workers passively work for others.

How to choose Technical Or Manager?

  • Neither one is better than the other, they are just personal choices.
  • The two are not completely separated. There are also positions like “Technical Leader Manager”.
  • Even if you are not a Manager, you do not have the ability to directly manage others, but you still need to influence and persuade others.
  • Follow the principle of least regret in any decision. Is this the least I regret doing? Can I accept the worst? Enjoy!
  • Get to know yourself while you’re young and find out what interests you. Try it if you’re interested and see what’s possible for yourself.
  • We often cannot see our own ability subjectively, so we should ask others for their opinions.

How to maintain long-term passion in your work/business?

Keep the original intention and curiosity, maintain a sense of mission and responsibility.

  1. Curiosity about the world
  2. Competency curiosity (where are your boundaries?)

Computer Science is the most exciting industry!

Work Life Balance

Achieving Balance requires:

  1. self-discipline
  2. focus
  3. learning

It doesn’t matter if you walk slowly, but you can go far as long as you walk forward.

A question about women’s and men’s confidence

What do you think of the phenomenon that some jobs require men to go back and try if they think they are 50% match, but women will only try if they think they are 90% match? Or their own body also have such a phenomenon?

  • People need to build their confidence.
  • Learn to seize opportunities when your abilities improve.
  • Express your process and let others see your potential.

Flutter

Google officially released Flutter 1.9 at this GDD.

Only Flutter has run “Hello World!” I haven’t had any deep experience of it yet. However, in this GDD’s introduction of Flutter and the sharing of Flutter cases of various enterprises, I deeply realized that this is indeed the general trend.

It’s not that native client development is dead, but if you’re a client developer, you might want to learn about Flutter, as more and more Chinese companies are using the technology to develop their own products.

Google Cloud

GCP basic introduction

It mainly introduces some basic services on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and how to select service types according to your own requirements.

  • Google Compute Engine (GCE) : Linux VMS run on Google servers. It takes only 10 seconds to start and load a Linux VM.
  • Cloud Storage: Files are stored to the Cloud.
  • Cloud SQL: Relational database services (MySQL, PostgreSQL…) .
  • NoSQL: JSON structure, no Schema.
  • Cloud native environment:
    • GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) : Google’S K8s service.
    • Cloud Functions: event-driven serverless computing platforms.
    • Cloud Run (beta) : Run stateless HTTP containers in a fully managed environment or in your own GKE cluster.

Break the world record for PI

March 14 is also known as Pi Day. On that date this year, Google announced that they had calculated PI to 31.4 trillion decimal places, or 31,415,926,535,897 decimal places to be exact, breaking the Guinness World Record. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The previous record was 22.4 trillion decimal places, set by Peter Trueb in 2016. The record was achieved by Emma Haruka Iwao, a Japanese Google employee, who used y-Cruncher, the software that calculates PI. The results are based on the 25 Compute Engine virtual machine nodes in the Google Cloud over 111.8 days from September last year to January this year. During computing, Google Cloud performs thousands of live migrations without interruption, but has no impact on computing.

Related news: Google shows off its computing power in the cloud by computing 31.4 megabytes of PI to produce 170TB of data.

Breaking the world record is a testament to Google Cloud’s computing power and stability. It is also the first time that cloud technology has been used to calculate PI.

Emma also shared her own experience with Talk:

  • Born and raised in Osaka, Japan, she started coding at age 11, but was never good at math, and her middle school teacher suggested she study liberal arts.
  • She studied education in college. After a year, the professor decided that she was more interested in programming and suggested that she change her major to computer science. This was the best decision she made in her life.
  • She didn’t think she was a “good” software engineer.
  • She interviewed five times with Google, and failed the first four times.
  • She never thought that she could break the world record.

Emma’s sharing was inspiring. I’ve always thought of myself as a clumsy developer, but maybe if I worked hard enough, as Emma said, “a teenager without a supercomputer can achieve his dreams.”

After the Talk, I went to the experience area on the second floor and took the challenge of “taking PI shorthand in 8 seconds and typing recited numbers in 15 seconds”, and finally left my name on the leaderboard

Third place is me!

conclusion

Jun Ting Chen, president of Google Greater China, said in the opening remarks:

What we really want to see is the developer’s smiling face.

And that’s exactly what Google showed at GDD. They’re making it easier and more enjoyable for developers to develop, so that all of us have a better app experience. Also impressive is the Grow With Google initiative, which aims to “empower more people in the digital age”.

Different from some traditional techniques, Computer Science is an emerging field. It is only 82 years since the Turing model was put forward, while the rise of The Internet in China is only about 20 years ago. So we have a lot of opportunities, but we also have a lot of challenges. China may still be lagging behind foreign technologies, but Chinese developers are constantly innovating and challenging themselves. I was proofreading an article for the Nuggets Translation Project the other day and came across a quote that applies here:

I’m nowhere near the level of competency I want to be, but I’ve definitely come a long way since I started. :

I was nowhere near where I wanted to be, but I knew I was destined to go far when I set out. 🙂

Thank you for your company and look forward to our next meeting! Happy Mooncake Festival ~🥮🎉

Further reading

  • Flutter 1.9 features
  • ARCore introduction
  • Android 10 features, news, and release date

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