About me Archives - TIMEA TURDEAN

My personal opinion about Solid

I was thinking hard about how to explain Solid best. I like explanation videos. And because I am not talented at creating them and because someone already did a great job, I simply share one I like.

What is Solid?

Why a new Web in the first place?

As the Web is today, there are a few problems. The ones that bother me the most are:

Openness and accessibility

I have a Facebook account. If I want to share a social media update with a friend who does not have Facebook, I need to make it public and thus available for everyone to see it. That is not open nor accessible! Who creates this rule? The service provider, Facebook. Facebook owns my social circle.

Censorship and privacy

The truth is, my data, in whatever service it is on, could be sold to companies I would not know about it maybe. Everyone knows by now ‘if the service is free you are paying with your data. The service I have my data on can chose to do whatever because they are the authority. They can decide tomorrow that all data that contains the word ‘poop’ is going to be censored and deleted. And if I want to continue using their service, if I am not already banned, I need to sign their new Terms & Conditions.

What do people say about Solid?

Looking online at the general concerns about Solid I try to give my personal 5 cents about them and thus complete the image of what Solid is and can become.

How are data-thirsty companies going to buy into Solid?

At first, they will not. Not as long as their business model is based on monetizing user’s data. However, if they are smart, they will have/already have solutions in place to keep their business successful without owning so much data.

Recently I looked into the Amazon business case. One can see that their business is shifting or at least they have a strategy in place to help them be resilient in the face of such a data privacy change. I think their strategy is to become the ultimate service/experience provider in retail. They will not care where the data will be stored since their competitive advantage will be to offer the best service. For example, Amazon can provide the ultimate shopping experience based on tech (see Amazon Go). Don’t get stuck on the Amazon Prime account – that could well be your WebID. And do not get stuck on payment. Your WebID could contain your preferred payment method which your bank trusts and ultimately allows the transaction. In the end, you could be using Amazon Go which just happens to be, in the future, the go-to system in all shops…

And why would Amazon Go be the best system in place? The concept itself is not based on data, on your data. It is based on shopper needs which right now seems to be about ‘time’: ‘no line, no checkout’. Yes the ML and AI are based on data but that data will continue to be available as research data or Amazon could buy it from you.

If you notice, Solid could shift the focus from a business model based on the heaps of data to a business model based on best service quality.

How are data-thirsty companies going to buy into Solid? Take Two.

Because of YOU!

If we start to have choices that are based on the best service provider, best safe Pod host, best UX and accessibility, best experience, the data collecting giants will be left behind. They will have no choice but to change strategy and get in line with what the little people want. We might be little but we are billions, we are the market.

What keeps companies from simply copying your data? And keeping it?

They can do that now. And they could maybe do that in the future too until I, the user, pull the plug and with that, they will get no more up-to-date data about me. Current business models driven by data mean that the data is up to date, near real-time. This is very important because if they have my data from last year it will be majorly outdated when it comes to saying: my book purchase preferences, or fashion or whatever! I argue that the value of data is in its freshness.

And also, I hope, there will be policies and laws in place that will not allow this. Because if the market asks for the best quality in a service provider and we hear about privacy concerns we will deregister, cut the data plug and move to the next most secure service provider.

How about security concerns of Pods being individually hacked?

This is a good valid point! The premise is that a hacker would target individual Pods. Hmm… might not pay off. Let’s say that a hacker can hack more Pods at the same time because of a loophole in the tech. Pretty much what is happening right now! So how is that a bigger concern than how it is now?

My final thoughts

I think Solid will co-exist in parallel with the Web we have today. Nothing will change drastically and fast! We will keep having Social Media accounts, Amazon accounts, Google accounts, and data all over the place. However, we will have a new choice more privacy-sensitive. Diversity and inclusion is all about giving people choice.

My first (official) month in the Solidverse

or how to start a new chapter of your life

In this post, I report on how it was to start a new chapter of my life, what I did and how it felt. For a technical take on the Solidverse, there will be a follow-up post.

First things first, why a new chapter?

Job hunting usually triggers a new chapter, doesn’t it? I started looking for a job in the domain of Semantic Web. I send in a CV at Inrupt even though there was no open positions. The whole process took about 3 months. This gave me enough time to consider if I should accept the position offered to me or not. The reason why it took so long is related to the hiring process and my struggle to come back after what felt like a startup failure (read about My year of entrepreneurship).

Why Solid?

I very much agree with what the Solid Project website says: “your data your choice”. It is my first job where we all work for a greater purpose bigger than just revenue. The point is: the future is still so much bigger when it comes to the world wide web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Inrupt team are spearheading a new technology, Solid, which empowers individuals and opens new value creation opportunities. Instead of waiting for the future to happen, I decided I want to be part of shaping it. I got a position as a Software Engineer on the open-source SolidOS project guided by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Down the rabbit hole

Everything was new… and it felt like a tremendous change. Who is not scared, a bit, by change?

The start

Inrupt is a startup and one needs to get useful. In startups, getting told what to work on is not the norm. So I started with writing my job description. This was the first exercise where I needed to think about how to do my job and what I want to work towards. Being 10 years in the industry did help! Typically, for me, the plan goes as follows:

First month and a half: acquire knowledge about code, processes, and people.
Following months kick-off/embed yourself in a feature/sub-project where you think you can contribute. Then focus to deliver.

There were a lot of new things for me: new programming language, new development environment, new OS, new laptop, new working culture (all remote), different timezones, open-source, new ecosystem, new people, new chat applications, new processes, new autonomy in a company, new hair color 😏. The only thing that stayed the same was my desk at home, luckily 😅 (which changed already a month before). And the fact that I already know Semantic Web.

The first official week, I felt overwhelmed by the autonomy I have. This is not for everyone! I was a bit spinning I gotta admit, the first day before I anchored myself in my usual fallback solution: create a todo list 😎. Spinning for me means: fussing around being unfocused, not knowing what to do because either there are too many tasks or because one does not know how to start, on the what to focus. A todo list always helps me. What is your fallback solution?

The second week, I started to feel a burdening imposter syndrome. You know, the feeling which we all have when we are new to something. It is the feeling of being discovered as a no-good and fired on the spot 😱. I suppose it was all normal especially because my environment involves working with people with a lot of experience from high-profile companies. Or people with years of business and developer experience. And, well, there was the ‘creator of the web boss’ things which, I gotta admit, was intimidating at first. However, reality is nothing like that.

If you ever had impostor syndrome you know what I mean 🥺. I got over it because the people I work with are just amazing, supportive, and understanding. They told me about their impostor syndrome and I did not feel judged, for a second, for my experience, background, culture, gender, and so on. And that right there made all the difference!

The middle

Compared to my previous times of starting a new job, I did not focus only on reading and learning. Instead, I decided to bang my head by taking on a code feature and work it out. Bang my head means: write code before reading the entire documentation or knowing the entire code architecture or whatever.

My new approach was so much fun!!! It worked because:

My reading and learning focused on basics that helped me be productive – building code with node, javascript basics, npm packaging, visual studio code shortcuts.
I know how to ‘divide and conquer’ a task, split it into subtasks and achieve small goals.
I got great feedback on the way, through pull requests.
And most AWESOME: I got a buddy who introduced me to SolidOS code, to the communication, and to the people (thank you Sharon!).

And what do you know: I did my first Pull Requests on open source, I learned a ton about the code, and I found tasks where I can be useful moving forward.

Towards the end of the month, I felt more on top of the code stack and I could focus again on what I wanted/needed to do after the learning phase.

Slowly, I started to gather information about a new feature I want to kick off.
Talked to/found people who can help me implement it.
Exchanged some ideas and wrote up a bit of documentation.

The productive

What helped me go from getting started to be productive in a nutshell:

Have a buddy or ask for one.
Have a plan in place like 1.5 months learn then kick off smth.
Don’t get demoralized that one is not productive in the first month when only learning should be the goal – make a post-it if you forget “learning is the goal”.
Start learning about tech stack parts that make you productive – set up the environment, know how to build, use watch, and so on.
Lean on colleagues to help with overcoming impostor syndrome and not feeling like the new person – proactively plan coffee chats.
Divide and conquer every task – don’t get stuck in being overwhelmed by how big a task is and feel the ‘done’ effect when a small part has been achieved.
Talk to people and listen.

And most important:

Be kind to yourself in the process of change! Accept that you will have bad days and non productive days and days where not much will work. ‘Those too shall pass”.

The beautiful part about it was that even though I went in this endeavor with low energy, I did not get lost in stress but through kindness and patience, I was more productive than I thought I could be.

What’s next

Now I am off to my last MBA course (on leadership) so I can close that chapter of my life too. I am careful lately about my energy level and try to finish a project before starting new big ones. The startup year exhausted me there 😓.

Regarding Solid, oh!, I have so many cool things I want to do. The Solidverse captivated me completely! I felt welcomed and useful and valued. I am off to a great new chapter of my life, full of code and creativity, and collaborative work!

#hackthecrisisat

This weekend I decided to stop complaining about my throat and head ache over the week. And I stopped feeling useless. And I stopped feeling like work is everything I got. I decided to join an online hackathon!

Yup.. we are in the middle of it. It will finish tomorrow. And it feels great!!! My confidence, chipped away at work, is back! I felt valued and appreciated and grateful that my “generalist” skills (i call it so because I have confidence problems lately (Impostor Syndrome)) are useful to someone 🙂

My personal goal from the hackathon of learning something new and contributing was already achieved! I did not think it would be so easy actually. I loved to listed to ideas and find out about resources and have the opportunity to meet other people who know and like RDF.

Concretely: what at the beginning was a pile of ideas and wishes and divers points of view, I managed to converge to a concrete goal, a focus in the team. All the great ideas needed to be part of something achievable and deliverable in 2 days. I also jumped on installing SemanticMedaWiki on a EC2 AWS…. much like I learned from hosting my own website. (ieii happy about this one). Yup and I got to learn about SemanticMediaWiki.

The project is not over. Tomorrow is the great showdown with pitching and all… And I really want to get to know the input for the business model and the structure of the pitch. All super cool topics I am interested in lately.

In all this excitement I even forgot to mention what the project is about. Original idea:

Platform Eutopia
There exists no platform where one can get an overview about all the problems or bottlenecks we are facing at the moment in connection with the corona crisis and the possible solutions for those. And also with the people and connections that are already working on the problems.

More about the outcome:

See here the final project pitch presentation I ever did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25yVp74U4ho&feature=youtu.be

Project website: https://evolution-circle.wixsite.com/website and the SemanticMediaWiki: http://54.93.194.43/wiki/Eutopia

Reference: https://hackthecrisis.bubbleapps.io/

P.s There are a bunch of hackathons on this topic all over the world. Not too late to join one, for example the upcoming global one: https://covid-global-hackathon.devpost.com/submissions

And more:

https://wirvsvirushackathon.devpost.com/submissions

https://changemakers-day-hackaton.devpost.com/submissions

https://endcoronavirus-org-hackathon.devpost.com/submissions

https://hackfromhome.devpost.com/submissions

https://freshworks-fights-covid.devpost.com/submissions

https://coronawiki.net/index.php?title=ALL_Projects

https://coronavz.com/

Volunteering & me – part 2

In the previous post about volunteering & me I was mentioning the communities I was part of in the past years and what I was doing there. In this post I want to put down all the training I benefited from (received and given for free) in these communities and more. Here goes:

Leadership & Management 2009 AIESEC
Effective communication 2010 AIESEC
Public speaking 2010 AIESEC
Product Management 2010 AIESEC
Global competency model 2010 AIESEC
Entrepreneurship 2010 AIESEC
Become a trainer 2010 AIESEC
Communication & presentation skills 2010 AIESEC
Audience management 2010 AIESEC
Needs assessment 2010 AIESEC
Delivery methods 2010 AIESEC
Preparing a session 2010 AIESEC
Briefing & debriefing 2010 AIESEC
First given training on “Presentation skills” 2010 AIESEC
Goal setting 2010 AIESEC
Ar of Feedback 2010 AIESEC
All about coaching 2010 AIESEC
Management & leadership 2011 BEST
Effective meetings 2010 BEST
Communication weekend training 2011 BEST
Giving and receiving Feedback 2011 BEST
Knowledge Management training 2011 BEST
Entrepreneurship course 2011 at TU Vienna
Myer-Briggs Type Indicator training 2011 BEST
Strategic planning 2011 BEST
Motivation 2011 BEST
Delegation 2011 BEST
Leadership styles 2011 BEST
Coaching course 2011 TU Vienna
Effective meetings delivered by P&G 2012 BEST
Critical thinking 2012 TU Vienna
Creativity (6 hat concept) 2012 TU Vienna
Startup weekend training – pitch training 2013 Ideen Triebwerk Graz
Growth hacking 2014 ABC BEST
Pitching training 2014 ABC BEST
360 community management 2014 GDG
Presentation skills GDG
Fund raising BEST
Unconscious bias at Google GDG
Motivation GDG
Design thinking GDG

And then I lost track of them.

I also started delivering on my own on topics that are dear to me: Impostor syndrome and Unconscious bias (and also some technical talks all mentioned in the previous post).

And lately, here in Vienna, I like to go to workshops offered by PWN . I joined so far:

Financial sustainability
Salary negotiations
Finding your purpose

If you look at my list you could say I did an entire school of social skills on the side of university. Well yes. Some of the courses were at university but the most are not offered there, so you gotta do self development somewhere else. This is what organizations are about: self development! Becoming a better you, exchanging ideas, becoming a “change agent”.

During all these training, I got to meet amazing people and I got amazing feedback that helped me improve and have a healthier and open mind, be more tolerant.

So what? you might ask.
Truth is, it is a personal story of how one can make use of such a rich palette of knowledge. Using it in the right moment and in the right way is a challenge for me too at times. This does not mean that the teams I work in always has effective meetings nor that feedback is my main tool to communicate. Not at all! Especially in professional life, where unfortunately, social skills STILL come last, (I am not saying EVERYWHERE but majority) it is much harder to establish yourself as… ultimately as a leader. It all adds up in the end. These training gave me the skills to be a good leader!

I leave a link to an interesting post here as a q.e.d: https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/why-do-people-quit-their-jobs-exactly-heres-entire-reason-in-3-simple-words.html

Volunteering & me

SO lets see… (searching in my memory)

Dry intro

When I sometimes (still) get to talk about my motivation to spend quite a lot of my free time on volunteering I always start with: I’ve been volunteering since I started University. I’ve been involved in different communities since 2007, for more than 11 YEARS!

When I get asked WHY?… Honestly, nowadays, it is simply because: this is what I know to do! In my free time, I am used to. going to organizer meetings, be volunteer responsible at a conference, take care of conference registration, make sure speakers are introduced or evolve partnerships and bring in sponsors and most important mentor/motivate/empower people… (these are the usual, these days).

However, I want to take this opportunity and present my volunteering CV (which I was postponing for years to do) and ALL the trainings and skills I gathered in 11 years. These are points, which in my CV, land under hobbies or I mention only maybe 25% of them as social skills. Why? Because a CV should not be longer than 1-2 pages, maximum 3! Also because, too little, HR people looking for developers/engineers are interested that you live a double life. Usually this is mentioned, by me, in face to face interviews when required. Do you have better suggestions?

My volunteering CV (about my second life) 😉

2012 Nov. – present days – member of GDG Vienna

My biggest achievement in GDG Vienna is creating the Women Techmakers Vienna community. This is the 6th year since it exists and a lot of people appreciate us and like what we stand for:
Equality & diversity in STEM regardless of gender. Community builder, people empowering and networking are key skills that helped me achieve this together with like-minded people I met through GDG (locally and globally).
I was organizer of DACH level tech conference DACHfest.
I was 6 times organizers of DevFest Vienna.
And I organized numerous meetups and delivered tech and social content.

2011 Oct. – 2014 May – member of BEST Vienna

Vienna Summer Course 2011 project – I was main organizer of one of the biggest projects which bring, yearly, to Vienna, around 20-25 European students from other different technical universities to share culture and knowledge. I was leading a team of 6 people making sure the event happens on time and in the budget and that team members, participants and professors are happy (all stakeholders).
Board member – HR responsible – board membership is a year long engagement. Along with 6 other dedicated persons on dedicates roles, we devised and executed the strategic plan meant to create and leave a local sustainable organization while leading by the European level vision: “Empowered diversity“. My responsibility was recruiting, motivating and empowering community members.
I was involved in numerous other local projects over the years and towards the end I was more in a mentor role. Now I am proud BEST Vienna ALUMNA.

2007 Oct. – 2011 June – member of AIESEC Cluj-Napoca

IT Challenge project – while in AIESEC I was a participant and main organizer of IT Challenge. The project was bringing technical students closer to tech companies who offered case-studies to be solved by participants. At the 3rd edition of the project I was leading my own team of 5 people and making sure we are reaching our goals. I learned project management, team leading and about motivating volunteering student. It also brought me my first tech internship at NOKIA R&D in Cluj-Napoca.
I was also an aspiring trainer and “graduated” while delivering content at the biggest Romanian intercultural preparation seminar conference, which had over 400 participants (if I remember correct, were probably even more..)
On my road of becoming a ‘change agent‘ I took part in a AIESEC internship done at the Technical University of Graz, Austria. Which changed my life!
Now I am proud ALUMNA of AIESEC Cluj-Napoca

In the next post I will mention the numerous trainings and content I had the opportunity to be exposed to due to these volunteering opportunities.

New year new project

It is official: I am a developer, again!!!

Yup and I am very happy about it. The fist month back to code is almost over and I learned quite some stuff, 24 points to be exact, ’cause I’m keeping track. I should maybe mention some of them in another post. For now, this post is about something else, something I am wanting to pick up since some time but ALWAYS found a reason why not. Well, this time I should be out of ‘why not’ reasons and just do it: work on a personal projects.

Last year I started flirting with Golang, ah… just for the sake of it (another postponed thing). And I actually did some problem solving on HackerRank to get started. Then, I also read a super interesting survey result, also from HackerRank, which talks about what employers want and what developers can do. That is where I got the idea to also go back do some Javascript (also because my project need at least a basic frontend).

Here I am, shaping up a project idea, more useful than fun, more for learning than being useful. But that is to be decided later… what it will become.

Some things are certain:

Functionality

search & autocomplete
suggest a new entry
admin dashboard with CRUD actions
2 types of users: admin and public
API (maybe) for further features like – statistics, graphics, similarity…

Stack

backend: Golang
frontend: Javascript

This is my commitment to see it through basically! I will also soon post my git repo when it is up. Oh oh and did I mention, the topic is: funding and women in STEM!

Updated on 15.08.2021: This project did not pick up. I leave this here to showcase the struggle I have when I want to work on some personal coding projects. I want it to showcase that you do not need to do extra coding projects in your free time to be good at coding.

I got interviewed about Impostor Syndrome

Hello everybody,

I had the opportunity to give an interview for the magazine WOMAN regarding the topic of Impostor Syndrome. The article is only in German and was not available online so I uploaded it here for who is interested to read it. Credits to Angelika Strobl who interviewed me and wrote the article. Enjoy!

GDG Summit & Google I/O 2014

Overview

The first Google I/O was held in March 2008. This year Google had its 7th conference. A constant topic on these conferences is Android. Other topics include products that Google has been working on: Google Maps, Google TV, Google Music, Google+, Google Now and so on. These conferences are the highlight of the year, where the “googlers” get to show off their hard work of the past year. They manage to amaze and push the technological boundaries every year and raise issues of the not so far future. This year, I was one of the lucky ones to receive a Google I/O ticket which “teleported” me to California to attend the Google Developer Group (GDG) Summit at the Googleplex in Mountain View and the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.

First of all: what is Google Developer Group Summit?

GDGs are groups of people “who are interested in Google’s developer technology; everything from the Android, Chrome, Drive and Google Cloud to product APIs like the Cast API, Maps API and YouTube API“. GDG members volunteer and organize tech talks, events like code sprints, hackathons and much more. The Summit is the event where some of the members of such groups, which are world wide, get together and share their experience. There are 500+ GDGs in 100+ countries to date. These GDG communities are supervised by some people who work at Google. They work in Google Developer Relations as Developer Community Advocates. However, GDGs are independent local groups which choose which events they want to hold and what to talk about in their meetings. Next you see the map of all teh GDGDs in the world.

GDG Summit 2014

The 2014 GDG Summit was held at the Googleplex in Mountain View and it was a 3 day event. We were 350+ participants from all over the world, from South America to New Zeeland (see the above picture). The first day was “arrival day”. We were offered pickup shuttles from the San Francisco Airport which brought us to the hotel where we were hosted. At the hotel, everyone could check in and register for the GDG Summit by taking their name badge. Each organizer was sharing a hotel room with another participant. The official program started only the second day earlier in the morning. We were taken with the shuttles to the Googleplex where breakfast was organized, outdoors this year. Afterwards we moved to our conference room where we had different sessions.

We started with a short overview of the past events we organized in different GDGs and went into specifics for the Women Techmakers (WTM) events. The WTM events were held in 49 countries during the month of March. We reached 10.000 developers from which 70% were female participants. 82% of the speakers of this events were women.
Another session was about Engaging organizers. We talked about motivators, the cycle of membership, rewards and recognition for different roles that organizers have in the GDGs and about solving conflicts. A very interesting chart of types of members is shown in the next figure.

Next we had a round of lightning talks:
1. Getting money through Fund Raising
2. GDG mentorship Initiative
3. Attracting and training volunteers
4. Google community ecosystems: we are all connected
5. Cross Chapter collaborations
6. Organizing a pre-event for the Start-up weekend (in Dublin)
7. GDG Metrics
8. Collaborations with other organizations
9. Programming – for kids
10. What we learned from devFest13 (GDG Lviv)
11. Africa Android challenge
12. tech for social good
13. GDG[X] – a new GDG App
14. Massive Games over Google Cloud
15. Content is king but distribution is queen
16. Renderscript for Android

The full agenda of the conference can be seen here.

The first conference day was closed with dinner and a Talent Show organized by the participants themselves in the room where we had the sessions. Dinner was proceeded by a cultural sharing of everyone’s local food or drinks and swag from their different organized events over the last year. It was a multitude of colorful pieces of culture combined with different personalities of wonderful people. The Talent Show was a hit with live music and dancing in a cozy, comfortable environment created over the day.

The second day, we were taken again with the shuttles to the Googleplex Campus where we had breakfast. The second day was dedicated to unconference sessions where you could choose the discussion topics you wanted to attend. We also had time to visit the Google Store on Campus and have lunch (this time at the actual Google cafeteria which has great food). After a Google Glass Design session we got in our shuttles and got to San Francisco. In town we had time to check in at our hotels and most important check in at the Moscone Center for the Google I/O. At the registration I got a name badge with NFC, a T-shirt and a water bottle with the I/O logo on it. People had different evening events or just rested in their rooms but the women that participated at the GDG Summit were invited to a special Women Techmakers Dinner. At the dinner I found out that in the restaurant were over 500 women from different volunteering organizations from the Bay Area: PyLadies, RubyGirls… and of course GDG Women (from all over the world). It was this event where I met Megan Smith from Google [X] who ignited interesting women topics among us. It was amazing to see how we all connect on different issues or challenges we have in our professions no matter which country we were from.

More about the GDG Summit can be read on the official event website.

Google I/O 2014

At the Google I/O we were offered each morning breakfast at the ground floor, in the big hall. There were a lot of tables organized and buffet food on the margin. The lunch was the same, except with more people standing in line. On the first day, everyone was standing in line outside to enter the keynote. The line got quite long. As GDG members we had a separate waiting area. This year it was in front of the press entrance. We got to enter the keynote hall before the line of the people outside. We had reserved seats right after the press line.

To be there live and on great seats awaiting the countdown was already super exciting. At this keynote, Larry Page did not get on stage to talk but I did see him enter the hall. During the event there were two manifestations. The first one was a woman who stood up in the front row and held a placard with something written on it. She was complaining about the real estate situation in San Francisco due to Tech companies. And the second person was a guy who started to shout quite loud disturbing the current speaker on stage. He was shouting something like “Google is building killer robots”. Both people were removed by staff. At the second guy someone from the public shouted back “Go home!” as a reply to his accusations. The keynote was exciting for me also because of these disturbances.

During the rest of the conference more presentations and talks were held. You could chose what you are interested in and join. I had two personal favorite presentations. One was about “The Pirates” who work on projects like Tango and ARA which I was interested in. The second talk I liked most was the “Biologically inspired models of intelligence”. I like Ray Kurzweil’s presentation about the future of technology which I felt was missing from the keynote. Last year Larry Page answered some questions which involved this point of view.

Besides the talks, there were different stands organized where shorter talks or presentations were taking place. There also was a codeLabs corner and a Google Glass corner at the ground floor. Also, on the second floor there was a company corner with Duolingo, Runntastic and some more. At Runntastic you could win a Google Glass if you held the record in squats over the conference days. At the Google Glass corner one could try Glass and take a virtual tour of the history of so called glass wear. One could also buy the Google Glass there. At the Android Car station one could try out the new presented innovation at the keynote. For GDGers there was a GDG Lounge organized, where we could hang out, share ideas or experiences from the ongoing conference or watch live some of the talks on big screens.

After the first day, there was a dinner party organized outside in a garden like place in the center of San Francisco. There was a silent disco and life music. The food and drinks were served from different food stands and for free. To chill and network there were beds and comfortable corners placed on the grass. The atmosphere was great and the view was amazing looking over the close skyscrapers covered in mist.

On the second day we received our Android Wear. You could choose between a Samsung and an LG watch. Both were looking great! I chose the LG Watch. In order for the LG watch and the cardboard gadget to properly work one needed a good phone which had at least NFC or Android v 4.3.

After the second day, as GDGers, we were all invited for dinner at the Google San Francisco office. After eating we had a party corner with music and dancing. People who left sooner for the airport said goodbye sooner and the rest said goodbye when the party ended at around 23:00. The next morning/day you could still meet GDGers in San Francisco, either shopping or sight seeing. Some people decided to stay longer or make a US trip out of it.

Closing

Now in Vienna, after almost 2 weeks after the event, the GDG G+ community is full of pictures and posts about what we all 350+ people experienced. The GDG developers already started releasing the first apps for the Android Wear. We received “Thank you for participation” E-mails where we were asked for feedback. And the GDGers already start planning their new events and talk about new dev challenges.

Follow the local communities on Facebook:

GDG Vienna

Women Techmakers Vienna