It's been about a week since I got to kick off Google Developer Day at Wembley, so I've had some time (and an 11 hour flight home) to reflect on the day. With the bright colors, technical sessions, and life-sized Connect Four behind us, the thing I'm still struck by is the feeling of community that permeated the day. The momentum has continued in Paris and Munich, and Madrid's event just getting started as I write this.

At Google, we're working hard to help move the web forward as a platform. But it's events like this that demonstrate how we're just one part of a much larger effort. Working together, it's clear we can accomplish much more than any one company or person could alone.

We just finished uploading all the session videos to a playlist on the Google UK Channel on YouTube. We've also posted the presentations and other materials.



And, of course, you can always find API documentation, articles, tutorials, and more on Google Code.

I hope you find these APIs and tools useful as you're developing and launching new applications. And, of course, please continue to give us feedback!

Tom Stocky
Director, Product Management

Well, the UK Google Developer Day really went off well. We're still collating your feedback, and already working out which parts you liked the most and how we can improve for next year. That's right. We're already planning, so if you have ideas or suggestions, please let us know.

While all that's going on, I'd like to shout out to the winners of our codelabs - those who managed to get stuff working above and beyond the basic examples.
Nick Burch in the OpenSocial Codelab managed to build a 'favourite postcode' app, which lets you show your friends your favourite Ordnance Survey maptile right in an OpenSocial container. It used remote data access to pull the data from a remote API, and then the persistence part of the API to store everything. It was pretty neat.
Nick, if you're reading, I've managed to lose the URL, so please drop me a line with it.

In the Geo codelab, Russell reports that winners were:
Krystian Czepiel
Esben Nepper
Jeff Tupholme
Conrad Winchester

He also wants to call out Conrad for suggesting some improvements to our code.google.com samples, which are currently being passed back to the team.

Jeff and Krystian picked up their prizes on the night, and I'd like to apologise for butchering Jeff's surname. It's pronounced Tup-home, not Tufolome, like I said. So, now you all know.

I got to spend some time with Krystian talking about the Base API, too. He's a smart cookie, and is pushing a few of our APIs to the limit in a lot of interesting ways. I now have lots of feedback for a few teams internally! Thanks Krystian.

Anyway, congrats to you all - sterling work, and thanks for taking part.
Overall, I was extremely impressed with how quickly people picked everything up. The prizes are well deserved.

We're doing similar labs in other countries, so if you have any feedback, please let us know if you think we can improve.If you missed the OpenSocial codelab, I quickly cobbled together a Google Site containing everything you need to get started on building your own app.
You can check it out at http://sites.google.com/site/opensocialcodelab

We've already had some attendees leave their impressions, so check them out if you like.
Mark Wilson at http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2008/09/google-developer-day-2008.htm
Al Sutton at http://alsutton.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/google-android-and-code-signing-app-shops/

And I'm sure there are many more out there. Drop a comment with a link to your blog, too. I'm sure people would like to read commentary which isn't just from us.

Well, that's all for now. I'll be writing up a report from our other developer days very soon, so check back often.

Chewy
Developer Advocate, Google London

Well, the Developer Day sessions have come to a close and it was a fun, code-packed and, at times, manic day. It was great to see so many people come together from so many different places, but even better to see how much they had to talk about. Just observing casual conversations in the halls and igloos as well as over the long lunch, it was really inspiring to see what can happen when you get so many great minds in a room together.

There were some great apps started in the code labs, the winners of which got Chrome comic books. We really look forward to seeing the development thereof. It was also cool to hear from Hyves and Netlog that the OpenSocial family has now grown by 10% (40M new users!) with the addition of their social networks as container sites. Thanks to Viadeo and MySpace for their great presence as well in the OpenSocial sessions, as well as the Met Office for sharing their maps experience. Lastminute.com, Rummble and ITN really provided some colour to the OpenSocial and Gears for Mobile talk as well. And last to Carl-Gustaf Harroch, who provided the real Android developer perspective. So thank you to our partners!

The road to get here was not perfect, though, and I thought I would share a few of the fun potholes we hit. My favourite was when Google Mail thought I was spamming our attendees by sending too many confirmation emails in one day. While I was reassured of the strength of the product as a Google Mail user myself, there was still a short-lived panic when questions were flooding in and the send function was disabled!

We also had a hiccough with UK customs and our customised Lego USB men loaded with code labs masterials. We planned every delivery for the day from the stages and video equipment right down to bags of crisps and the Guitar Hero. We just never factored in the 30-day customs holding period. Fortunately the little men made it in about 17 hours before the start of the event!

We made a short video to recap the day, which will be up shortly, alongside the keynote and the rest of the content on the Google UK YouTube Channel. There are loads of photos in these picasa web albums. For all those who could not make it, stay tuned to see all the session content - presentations and videos - in the next couple of days on the code site. But for now, I'll leave you with GDD in numbers. Up next will be some of Tom Stocky's thoughts.

• 1800 candy bars eaten (inspiring Twitter conspiracies about why we had so much chocolate.)
  
• 550 developers in attendance
• 60 Megabytes of internet (that never crashed!)
• 24 Google speakers
• 24 Google volunteers
• 20 partner speakers (Hyves, Netlog, Rummble, Lastminute.com, ITN, the Met Office & the head of the Android User Group.)
• 6 feet worth of stacked giant Jenga pieces
  
• 2 giant screens that had powerpoint & code throughout the day, then Wii and Guitar Hero for the party.
• 1 great day by had by us and, we hope, by you.

Liz Ericson
Product Marketing Manager - Developer Programmes