After deploying in the cloud, there’s a new trend towards programming in the cloud. Although I’m not sure we’re quite there yet, there are a couple of handy tools I’ve been enjoying when working on the Google Cloud Platform.

I had been using the built-in Cloud Shell console, on the Google Cloud console, to have a terminal already pre-configured for my Google Cloud project. It allows you to easily have access to your whole environment, run commands, etc, just like you would from your own computer. The fact that all the command-line tools you can imagine (gradle, maven, gcloud sdk, etc) are already there is helpful, as well as the fact that you are already configured for using other cloud services.

I’ll be back at JavaOne in San Francisco in October to speak about Apache Groovy and Google App Engine.

Apache Groovy

I’ve been involved with the Apache Groovy project for 14 years now, it’s a long time, and it’s interesting to see how the language has evolved over time, how it was influenced by other languages, but also how it influenced those other languages itself! Let’s see which operators or syntax constructs evolved and moved from one to the other.

InfoQ recently released a video from the APIDays conference that took place in Paris last year. I talked about scaling an Open API based web API using Cloud Endpoints, on the Google Cloud platform.

I spoke about the topic a few times, as web APIs is a topic I enjoy, at Nordic APIs, at APIDays, or Devoxx. But it’s great to see the video online. So let me share the slide deck along with the video:

Last week, I had the pleasure to speak at the Jenkins Community Day conference, in Paris, organized by my friends from JFrog, provider of awesome tools for software management and distribution. I covered how to scale Jenkins with Kubernetes on Google Container Engine.

For the impatient, here are the slides of the presentation I’ve given:

But let’s step back a little. In this article, I’d like to share with you why you would want to run Jenkins in the cloud, as well as give you some pointers to interesting resources on the topic.

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!

In two weeks, I’ll be flying east, much further east than I’ve ever been! I’ll visit Singapore! And I’ll have a pretty busy week with several events: conference, meetup, user groups, brown bag lunch… and I’ll talk about Groovy, Machine Learning, and chatbots!

First of all, on Wednesday 31st, I’ll participate to the Singapore Java User Group, where I’ll give an update on Apache Groovy (the latest improvements, new features, the roadmap).

The JAX conference, in Mainz, Germany, is coming to an end. I was there with my colleagues Mete and Robert, and had the chance to cover two topics: Machine Learning and Scaling Web APIs. It’s a pleasure to come back to this conference where the audience is always very focused, eager to learn, and is engaging in great and interesting conversations.

Machine Intelligence at Google Scale

My first presentation was about Machine Learning, and in particular with the Google Cloud APIs, including Vision, Speech, Natural Language, Translate, and Video Intelligence. Although I’m not an expert in TensorFlow and the Cloud Machine Learning Engine, I got a chance to say a few words about these. I guess I’ll have to play with both at some point to be able to tell even more!

That’s Devoxx France this week, and I’ve had the pleasure of delivering today another talk on the theme of chatbots, using Cloud Functions for the business logic, API.AI for the bot cleverness, with a bonus of a demo through Google Home and the Google Assistant platform.

I’ll post the YouTube video recording once it’s online, but in the meantime, I wanted to share my slides here:

And the video in French:

A new Java 8 runtime for Google App Engine standard is coming soon, and is currently in alpha testing. You can request to join the alpha program, if you want to try it out for yourself. But I wanted to let anyone play with it, easily, to see how well the Java 8 APIs work, but also to try some Java 8 syntax too. So here’s a web console where you can do just that!

You know what? It’s Pi Day today! Well, if you follow the American date standard, it’s 3.14 today, a nice approximation of Pi. Last year, in a past life, I had played with Pi already, but this year, my awesome colleagues (Ray, Sandeep, Francesc, Ian) have been working on some very cool demos around Pi, with the “Pi delivery”, at https://pi.delivery/

You can transform the Pi digits in a nice melody, show a D3.js based visualisation of the transitions between digits, you can stream the Pi digits, and more. And you can learn about how it’s been developed on the Google Cloud Platform.