Code Lab winners from London GDD

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