Google I/O Extended 2024 Cape Town

Google I/O Extended events are organized by local Google Developer Groups worldwide as an extended version of the main I/O conference held in California.

The Google Developer Group in Cape Town, in partnership with Le Wagon, hosted this year's event on 29th June.

The event provided attendees with a platform to connect, learn, and gain a deeper understanding of technologies announced at the 2024 Google I/O event, covering categories such as Mobile and Web Application Development, Artificial Intelligence (Reinforcement Learning), and Cloud Integrated Development Environment (Project IDX).

Ugo Mmirikwe, one of the organizers of GDG, kicked off the event and briefly talked about some of the exciting new developments, as well as introducing the guest speakers.

1. The keynote talk was presented by Atieno Allela. She started the event with "What's New for Developers?", focusing on how Google is at the forefront of the revolution, leveraging their powerful AI model, Gemini, to introduce a new generation of developer tools.

1. AI for Industrial Optimization using JAX and Google Cloud by Ruan de Kock. He facilitated a practical session titled "AI for Industrial Optimization using JAX and Google Cloud," demonstrating how InstaDeep leverages JAX and TPUs for training multi-agent systems both online in simulators and offline on existing datasets. He then walked through a Google Colab notebook where participants could train their first multi-agent system both from offline data and in an online simulator.

1. Infrastructure as Code: The Developer's Secret Weapon by Hennie Francis. In this talk, we delved into the world of IaC and explored how it empowers developers to supercharge their productivity, streamline workflows, and elevate their impact on the development process.

1. The Prompt Design Toolkit by Gabriel Cassim walked us through a short course on prompt design techniques and best practices for professional use or for building agents. The course covered various prompting designs for daily use or for building GenAI agents with techniques like Chain of Thought and ReAct.

Lunch break..

Google has introduced several exciting features and updates to its products. This year, the focus was on significant advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence), particularly highlighting a series of new developments in the Gemini model family, Google's revolutionary AI model.

There was also an emphasis on integrating AI across its products, including developer tools like Google AI Studio and Android Studio, as well as Gemini within Google Workspace.

Overall, the Google I/O Extended 2024 event was a fantastic and insightful experience, and I look forward to more innovations from Google in the near future.