The first meeting of the official Google Developers Group Malta branch was held on 28 May at St Martin's Institute for Higher Education.
The main aim of the Google Developers Group Malta is to bring together people from industry, academics and enthusiasts which work with or are interested in Google's numerous technologies, including Android, Chrome, Drive, Google Cloud platforms and application programme interfaces (APIs), like maps and Youtube. Malta's group is one of the 650 GDGs spread across 112 countries and registration is easy.
The launch event was held in conjunction with a Google I/O Extended Event. Google I/O is an annual conference held in San Francisco by Google featuring highly technical, in-depth sessions focused on building web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies. Several linked events are held in other countries, hence the Extended sessions.
Various workshops were organised in collaboration with the University of Malta, The Hive, Mobile Malta, Ixaris, Innovogy and Medilog for the event. These ranged from reactive programming for Android, which was delivered by Aldrin Seychell. Here the emerging discipline of reactive programming and its concurrency and data flow paradigms were introduced in the context of Android together with sample demos. Prof. Alexei Dingli delivered a workshop on Google Translate and the way forward in Artificial Intelligence, with an overview of the history of AI and the future of the area in context with real-time translation being the focus of the workshop.
Jonathan Barbara held a hands-on workshop on Ingress, which is Google's transmedia game, available to download on a smartphone. On the other hand, for the business minded, a workshop on how one may measure their business performance using various Google tools was delivered by Clayton J. Zammit. A further interesting workshop was organised by Dr Stefan Buttigieg MD, who gave an overview on the creation of Android applications for Healthcare.
Simultaneously with the workshops, which were mostly fully booked, the Google I/O official livestream of the conference happening simultaneously in San Francisco was available to watch. Over a hundred people attended this first meeting. At the end a social event ideal for networking was held. During this event, 120 people joined as members of the group.
Further information on GDG Malta can be found on Facebook and www.gdgmalta.com