Cloud Study Jam road trip through Portugal
A little bit over a week ago, I received an invitation from Google to come along on a week-long road trip through Portugal, facilitating Cloud Study Jams and maybe delivering a talk here and there. I couldn’t pass on the opportunity and jumped on board!
A couple days later I was landing in Lisbon, where I was joined by my friend Abdallah Abedraba (@aabedraba on Twitter). After having trouble finding a place to grab a bite late at night on a Monday and cruising trying to get a parking spot in Lisbon (which proved imposible) we crashed hard.
Next morning, the first step was hitting up the Android Training Program Portugal event that was taking place that morning in Setúbal, close to Lisbon.
Sleepy but happy
This event was repeated during the next few days at different cities and it was great to see so many students attending the lectures and making the best of the opportunity.
While Abdallah did his DevRel thing and since I wasn’t participating in this event I snuck out to work on my laptop and make some progress on my daily job. It was great to work from a university cafeteria again; I felt like I went back in time!
The energy from the students around me was great and I couldn’t help but wonder what they would end up building in their careers. A really nice surprise was the number of women studying there. There’s still a majority of men studying Computer Science, but there’s a lot more women that what I had seen in Spain when I was studying. Looks like a certain country is making good progress :)
A couple of hours driving and we got to Coimbra, where the first Cloud Study Jam was happening. We met with the GDG Coimbra organisers and went over the preparations before getting started.
After a brief Google Cloud Platform intro by Abdallah, we spent a couple of ours facilitating the IoT in the Google Cloud Qwiklabs workshops and helping people progress. It was great seeing everybody complete the workshops and get familiar with the Cloud IoT services inside the Google Cloud Platform.
A few weeks before I had delivered another talk at T3chfest about the Google Assistant’s Smart Home API, which we felt was a great fit to close the event. Now that students could manage IoT devices, we could teach them how to manage them with their voice through the Google Assistant.
A lot of people stayed after the event and we had a great time talking about technology, the similarities and differences between Spain and Portugal and the tech community in Portugal.
We made a quick stop at Coimbra’s University, which was beautiful (and apparently inspiration to different aspects of Harry Potter!) before having dinner and crashing hard at the hotel.
Second day of the road trip started with yet more driving and working on our laptops from the car while the other one drove. Yay multi-tasking! We also kind of started this game of musical dominoes, where one of us would queue a song that would fit the previous one by the other. It was a lot of fun, and we both made some discoveries. Just Jammin’ by Gramatik has been stuck in my head for a bit
That afternoon we met with the organisers of GDG Covilhã for the preparations of the second Cloud Study Jam. Just like the first day, we spend the afternoon helping out the attendees while they followed along the IoT on the Google Cloud workshops, and I closed the event with an encore of my Google Assistant talk about the Smart Home API.
We had a large number of attendees, and around 50% of women. It was great! We had all kinds of interesting questions and challenges and we received a lot of good feedback.
After a quick dinner and not having time for any sightseeing, we went back to the hotel. I think I fell asleep while working on my laptop, but I got so much done that day :)
Thursday we drove back to Lisbon for the final event of the trip. Organised by GDG Lisbon, this Cloud Study Jam was focusing on Machine Learning instead of IoT. We had a good number of attendees, and Abdallah took care of most of them while I resurrected my demo for a different closing talk. Turns out if you don’t run your demos for 6 months a lot of things can break…Ouch!
After some package updates and some rewrites, I was able to present my talk about integrating the Google Cloud Vision API with the Google Assistant, building a smart receipt management system.
This time only a few people stayed behind to provide feedback, which I thought was really interesting. My theory is that Lisbon being a bigger city means that it has a lot more tech events so people don’t feel the need to interact that much. There were a couple of notable exceptions, like one of the attendees who traveled to Lisbon just to be at the workshop. That’s dedication!
We had early flights on Friday (and we were hosting an event on Friday afternoon in Vigo too) so we went back to the hotel early.
After all was said and done, we had attended 4 different events, facilitated 3 Cloud Study Jams and I had delivered 2 different talks, one of them twice. Not bad for a week!
It was a great experience sharing an event with other GDG organisers and seeing how they prepared. It really made me appreciate the GDG ecosystem and all the work that is volunteered so we can get more people into technology.
Thanks for inviting me, Google! I loved being a part of this experience and would love to repeat, even though I’d like a bit more of a heads up than a couple of days 😅!
I’d like to also thank all the GDG organisers at GDG Coimbra, Covilhã and Lisbon, who organised the events and did a great job of hosting them and welcoming us. You rock!