❯ Guillaume Laforge

A year as a Google Cloud Developer Advocate

devrel advocacy career google-cloud

Time flies! Last week was my first “Googleversary”: It’s already been a year since I joined Google Cloud as a Developer Advocate. What a ride it’s been so far!

I announced my move to Google in June last year. And since then got the chance to:

  • talk at more than 20 conferences or meetups
  • give 3 keynotes
  • write 36 articles
  • meet with a dozen customers or so
  • addressed literally thousands of developers

For some conferences, like Devoxx Belgium, I even spoke 5 times! Or for my trip to Singapore, I had 6 talks or workshops lined up!

There’s a great level of freedom in this job, and you can decide where to put the cursor in terms of travel, or where to put the puck regarding the topics and products to cover. This is really wonderful!

I had the chance to cover things like Google App Engine (you know I’ve been a big fan of it since 2009!), Kubernetes / Container Engine, or Cloud Functions, on the compute side of the story, with a bit of Cloud Endpoints for the Web API aspect. And on the Big Data / ML side, I talked about the various Machine Learning APIs (Vision, Speech recognition, Natural Language processing, Video intelligence), or played with BigQuery for analyzing the Github dataset. And lately, my big hit at conferences and meetups, it’s been the hot topic of chatbots + serverless, with API.AI and Cloud Functions for building conversational interfaces.

But there are just so many hours in a day, and there’s so much more I want to work on and play with! As I often tell friends and developers that I meet here and there: working as a developer advocate for Google Cloud, it’s a bit like being a kid entering a toy store where you’d be told: “hey, here are all the toys we have, feel free to play with everything you want!” But it’s not only the toys… you also get the chance to play with other kids (err, sorry, fellow DAs) on all those things, to imagine the next epic game together!

I’m looking forward to telling you more about Google Cloud! Let’s meet and chat at the next conference or meetup!