A coupe weeks ago, I had the chance to talk at Cloud Next 2018, in San Francisco, with my colleague and friend Alexis. We talked about building and deploying microservices with Google App Engine and Cloud Functions. I’ve been a big fan of App Engine since 2009 when Google released the Java flavor, and have been enjoying doing a bit of Node / JavaScript on Cloud Functions since it came in beta. Read more...

On the Google Cloud front today, the big news is the release of the new Node.JS 8 runtime for Google App Engine Standard. It’s been a while since a completely new runtime was added to the list of supported platforms (Python, Java, PHP, Go). You could already run anything in custom containers on App Engine Flex, including your own containerized Node app, but now you can have all the nice developer experience on the Standard environment, with fast deployment times, and 0 to 1 to n instance automatic scaling (you can see the difference between those two environments here). Read more...

Back to GR8Conf Europe in Denmark, for the yearly Groovy community reunion! I had the chance to present two talks. The first one on Google’s Machine Learning APIs, with samples in Groovy using vision recognition, speech recognition & generation, natural language analysis. I’ll come back on ML in Groovy in forthcoming articles. And the second talk was an overview of Google Cloud Platform, focusing on the compute and storage options, with demos using Groovy frameworks (Ratpack, Gaelyk, and the newly released Micronaut) and how to deploy apps on Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, App Engine. Read more...

The venerable Google App Engine platform celebrated its 10th anniversary! Back in 2008, it started with Python, as its first runtime, but I got way more interested in App Engine when the Java runtime would launch the following year. It’s a bit of a special story for me, as I’ve always been a fan of App Engine, since the beginning. Over the years, I’ve built several apps running on App Engine. Read more...

What can you learn from millions of (Groovy) source files stored on Github? In this presentation, I analized source files in the Github archives stored on BigQuery, and in particular Groovy source file, but also Gradle build files, or Grails controllers and services. What kind of questions can we answer How many Groovy files are there on Github? What are the most popular Groovy file names? How many lines of Groovy source code are there? Read more...

Last month, for the first time, I visited Riga (Latvia), for the DevTernity conference. I really enjoyed my time there, and wish to come back with other topics next time. The organizers took very well care of the speakers, and the presentations were very interesting. I had the pleasure to talk about the pre-trained machine learning APIs provided by Google Cloud Platform, and say a few words as well about TensorFlow and Cloud ML Engine. Read more...

A few weeks ago, I’ve started a new blog dedicated to Google Cloud Platform, to share tips’n tricks I come across while exploring the platform, getting to know new products, or gathered through experience with a particular service I’ve been using: https://googlecloud.tips/ With the holidays season, I went with a “2018 countdown” approach (like an “advent calendar” without the religious connotation), where I publish a tip every day of the month of December. Read more...

Once in a while, when talking about Gradle with developers, at conferences or within the Groovy community (but with the wider Java community as well), I hear questions about Gradle. In particular Gradle vs Maven, or whether developers adopt the Kotlin DSL for Gradle builds. In the past, I blogged several times about using BigQuery and the Github dataset to analyze open source projects hosted on Github, by running some SQL queries against that dataset. Read more...

A few weeks ago, my buddy Wassim and I had the chance to present again on the topic of chatbots, with API.AI and Cloud Functions, at the DevFest Toulouse conference. Here’s the latest update to our slide deck: There’s also a video (in French) of the same content from Devoxx France, where I was showing how to build a conference chatbot: Chatbots, per se, are not really new, in the sense that we’ve been developing bots for things like IRC for a long time, but back in the day, it was simply some regular expression labor of love, rather than the natural language that we use today. Read more...

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. Read more...