At the end of December, I was contacted by someone I didn’t know, who asked me some interesting questions, and that led me to quite a bit of introspection.

As a Java Champion and with your career history. I wanted to ask you what you consider are the most important skills for a Java programmer to have in their toolbox, especially a Senior Java programmer? Or maybe even a better question is what skills you developed that helped you become the Java Developer/Groovy Language Developer that you are today.

J’ai eu le plaisir d’encadrer des stagiaires de 3ème récemment chez Google. Nous accueillons des enfants, neveux, nièces, cousins d’employés de Google (donc non :-P, je ne prends pas de stagiaire, pas la peine de demander !!!) pour leur faire découvrir les différents métiers que nous exerçons dans l’entreprise. Et il y en a beaucoup !

L’un de mes stagiaires m’a interviewé lorsque je décrivais mon travail de “Developer Advocate”, au sein de Google Cloud. J’ai trouvé cette interview intéressante, et je me suis dit que ça valait le coup de la partager avec vous, en Français (si, si, j’écris en Français parfois sur ce blog.)

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!

The cat is out the bag: I’m joining Google on June 6th, as a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform team!

My Groovy friends will likely remember when I launched Gaelyk, a lightweight toolkit for developing Groovy apps on Google App Engine? Since then, I’ve always been a big fan of the Google Cloud Platform (although it wasn’t called that way then) and followed the latest developments of the whole platform. And wohhh, so many new services and products have seen the light of day since my early experiments with App Engine! So there will be a lot to learn, a lot to do, and thus, a lot to advocate!