How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Geeking around Sydney, Australia

It's beautiful beach weather here in Australia (rumors are that we'll hit 44 this weekend - that's 113 for you Americans!), but that doesn't stop developers from geeking out hardcore, and me from joining them. Here's what we've been up to:

• Ignite Sydney: At this event, 8 presenters gave talks in the "Ignite" format: 20 slides, 5 minutes, 15 seconds each, no leeway. I gave a talk about "Flex v. HTML 5 for RIAs", where each slide covered a different feature you'd expect in an RIA - drag + drop, 3d graphics, history management, etc. It was both the shortest talk I've given and the most I've ever prepared for a talk. Of the other talks there, my favorites were "Lean programming" (illustrated with stick figures) and "How technology influences sexual awaress" - you can see Meitar presenting that to a room of slightly tipsy individuals in the photo below.
  


Photo by: halans



• StartupCamp Sydney: At this event, developers, marketers, and designers come together for a weekend of coding and pitching a startup - from scratch! You can see from the photo below how some of our attempts at pitching were a bit less serious than others. After all was said and done, the weekend produced 6 websites, and 36 completely exhausted but satisfied individuals (including myself). A number of the startups used Google Developer tools: Activity Horizon and MyPetNeedsLove used the Google Maps API to plot events and love-hungry pets, respectively, and ThreeFeeds (mine!) used the Google AJAX Search & Feeds API both on the client & server.
  



Photo by: liako

For the Aussie developers reading this, here are some upcoming events:

Google Developer Workshops: Over the 6 weeks, we'll have 4 talks/codelabs at the Google Sydney office, each covering a different Google developer product. For more information and registration, visit the website.

JAOO Sydney/Brisbane: At this dual-city developer conference, there will be 2 talks from Googlers: "API Design" by Joshua Bloch, and "Google App Engine: Building an App the Googley Way" by Pamela Fox.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team