For Google Cloud Next and Devoxx France, I’m working on a new talk showing how to build a conference assistant, to whom you’ll be able to ask questions like “what is the next talk about Java”, “when is Guillaume Laforge speaking”, “what is the topic of the ongoing keynote”, etc. For that purpose, I’m developing the assistant using API.AI. It’s a “conversational user experience platform” recently acquired by Google, which allows you to define various “intents” which correspond to the kind of questions / sentences that a user can say, and various “entities” which relate to the concepts dealt with (in my example, I have entities like “talk” or “speaker”). Read more...

The schedule for Google Cloud Next was unveiled this week, and there’s lots of interesting sessions to attend. With the many parallel tracks, it’s difficult to make a choice, but I wanted to highlight some of the talks I’d like to watch! The Google Cloud Platform is a pretty rich one, with many options for your compute needs. How do you choose which one is best for your use case? Brian Dorsey covers this in detail in this session: Read more...

The purpose of this article is to deploy a Ratpack web application on Google App Engine Flex. For my demos at conferences, I often use frameworks like Ratpack, Grails or Gaelyk, which are based on the Apache Groovy programming language. In a previous article, I already used Ratpack, but on a slightly more complex use case, but this time, I want to share a quick Ratpack hello world, and deploy it on Flex. Read more...

The GA release of Cloud Natural Language API is easier to use, better at recognizing language nuances and adds additional support for Spanish and Japanese Earlier in November, we announced general availability for the Cloud Natural Language API and highlighted the key new improvements. This launch included many additions to the API like expanded entity recognition, granular sentiment analysis with expanded language support, improved syntax analysis with additional morphologies and more. Read more...

All sorts of voice-powered assistants are available today, and chat bots are the new black! In order to illustrate how such tools are made, I decided to create my own little basic conference assistant, using Google’s Cloud Speech API and Cloud Natural Language API. This is a demo I actually created for the Devoxx 2016 keynote, when Stephan Janssen invited me on stage to speak about Machine Learning. And to make this demo more fun, I implemented it with a shell script, some curl calls, plus some other handy command-line tools. Read more...

Gradle is becoming the build automation solution of choice among developers, in particular in the Java ecosystem. With the Github archive published as a Google BigQuery dataset, it’s possible to analyze those build files, and see if we can learn something interesting about them! This week, I was at the G3 Summit conference, and presented about this topic: I covered the Apache Groovy language, as per my previous article, but I expanded my queries to also look at Grails applications, and Gradle build files. Read more...

Probably for vanity sake, or perhaps even out of jealousy seeing friends becoming “twitter verified”, I was curious to see if, me too, I could get those little ticks beside my name on my Twitter profile. Generally speaking, verified accounts are accounts of “public interest”. It can range from your usual movie stars, to politicians, from well-known artists, to company CEOs, but also persons somehow well known in the twittosphere, including tech luminaries, representative of particular tech communities, etc. Read more...

When you’re following a project, a company, a platform, you’re looking for the latest news, about the latest feature announcement, to take advantage of what’s coming up. Last time, I blogged about the gcloud command line tool, which nicely shows you the latest updates since the last time you updated its components. If you go to the Google Cloud Platform website, you’ll see dedicated release notes pages for pretty much all products. Read more...

As I was working on a demo for one of my talks at Devoxx, I was encountering a bug in my Groovy code (a Gaelyk app using Glide). I had deployed a new version of my App Engine app, changing some code to persist some data in the Datastore. After those changes, I saw a trace in the logs: Looks like there’s an error in receiveTweet.groovy on line 11. And there’s a link! Read more...

How do you filter access to your VMs on Google Cloud Platform? During a discussion with a customer, I was asked this question: only certain IP addresses or a range of IP addresses should have access to a particular VM. Let’s see that in action! Let’s assume you already have an account on Google Cloud Platform, but if you don’t, don’t miss the $300 credits for a free trial! I created a new project, then navigated to the Compute Engine section to create a new VM instance. Read more...