GDG SPb. What we managed to do in a year

The community of "Google Developers Group" in St. Petersburg was founded in 2006. However, we decided to sum up the year for the first time. GDG holds IT conferences and meetings for Android, Kotlin, Scala, Firebase, Dart and Assistant developers. In 2018, we held 17 conferences and meetings. Under the cat you will find the results and reviews of events, and even all the materials and records of class reports!

Kotlin User Group

At the end of 2017, we organized the first in Russia “Kotlin User Group”.

The first MUG KUG we opened with a report by Sergey Ryabov (a frequent speaker on Android & Kotlin at professional conferences) on how to make the Kotlin-code equally convenient for consumers and for Kotlin, and for Java. And checked for compatibility Spring Boot + Kotlin with Stanislav Slavin (Infobip).

At the beginning of the year, in the office of JetBrains, Vitaly Markus (Tinkoff.ru) made a report on the analysis of features during the migration to Kotlin, and Dmitry Zhemerov (JetBrains) spoke about the support for multiplatform projects at Kotlin.

Stanislav Erokhin (JetBrains) described the upcoming release of Kotlin 1.3.

A landmark event outside the KUG organization was the arrival of Hadi Hariri (JetBrains) with a report on functional programming. Formally, this report was made at the GDG mitap , but this does not change the essence. Hadi was in Petersburg and it was a sin not to invite him with a story about the functional Kotlin.

And on December 17, the final Kaplin / JS meeting was held with guest speakers: Sergey Rostov (JetBrains) and Alexandra Nikolaenko (eLama).

Android Academy SPb

In addition to organizing meetings and conferences, we organized Android Academy for beginner Android developers, with an emphasis on practice and presentation. In March, an introductory lesson took place, and in June ended with a hackathon in DataArt. To distribute the load, we divided people into several groups and attached them to each of our mentors. Much of the time and effort went into preparing lectures and homework. In addition to preparing the material, the task was to correctly distribute the topics and prepare for the presentation. Together with the hackathon 12 meetings turned out. And out of 200 people, 39 reached the finish line. The Android Academy mission was to transfer knowledge and experience from leading mobile developers from leading mobile development companies, including JetBrains, Redmadrobot and Yandex. After completing the Android Academy, we helped novice developers grow and create their own projects. With many of the guys, we continue to communicate and often see them at the meetings.

Devfest

The final chord of the year can be called a large-scale festival for developers DevFest SPb. The festival was attended by about 200 people, there were two streams of reports - web & mobile, game zone and afterparty at the end. https://devfest-spb.com

Instead of conclusion

What we want to do in 2019:

• More, MORE mitapov! We want your participation! So, we urgently need speakers. If you or someone from your colleagues wants to discover a speaker’s talent, wants to prepare a report, we are always open. Share your experience, test new tools, libraries and technologies, as well as solve problems that are not in the documentation. You can contact us in telegram chats https://t.me/gdgspb , https://t.me/kug_spb .
• Launch the second set of Android Academy. For this we need lecturers and mentors in unlimited quantities. If you often have to educate your developers, and you want to share your experience, feel free to contact the organizers and we will tell you everything and show you ((:
• Less work (: We are in search of new organizers. Do you feel an impulse to organize conferences and meetings, do you want to participate in organizing and holding cool events for developers? Contacts: see the first paragraph.

Happy New Year!