Sunday, March 9, 2014

2013 recap and 2014 roadmap

2013 has been our fourth year as a GDG/GTUG. If the first one was the foundation, the second one the consolidation, and the third the expansion one, this 2013 has continued with the expansion and the consolidation in a new direction.

The best way to understand why we continue calling this year the expansion one is to show some numbers:
  • 29 events in the whole year (3 more than on 2012); 
  • 244 members in developers.google.com (about 540 in our google group); 
  • We have 967 followers in our Google+ page, 463 members in our Google+ Community, and 2263 have "+1-ed" us
  • And 2121 participants in our events (539 more than the previous year), which means about 75 per event on average (14 more per event than the previous year)!


Following the course of the previous year, we talked about many different topics (Android, Guava, AngularJS, Testing, Customer Development with Google tools, Accessibility, Go, Google Maps, Google Apps, Google’s Cloud, Android Studio, Gradle, Google Glass, etc...) in all kinds of events like conferences, codelabs, beerworkings (beer + networking), parties, Live conferences (using Hangouts on Air). Furthermore, we did the biggest DevFest we had ever done.





2 keynotes, 20 conferences, 2 codelabs, 1 hackathon, 1 guide and 1 game for Android, 6 GDGs organizing (Lleida, Mallorca, Valencia, Vigo, Tarragona and Barcelona), almost 1000 registered and 520 attendees, made the GDG DevFest our most successful event so far. Besides being a great event, it also gave us a renovated vigor: potential speakers approached us, new ideas came, and in no time things went crazy! You can find videos of some conferences here and photos here.




2013 started with our renewed team and an explosion of events (21 in the first 3 months) that caught up with us. Although our community asked us more events, we quickly saw that we didn’t keep the pace (at least without nobody wanting to join the organization team), so we decided to reduce the number of events and focus on improving the quality of those. A good example of that was the DevFest
.

For 2014 our plans have changed again slightly. We have seen that the community has matured and now is demanding advanced-level events. So, without forgetting those events focused on beginners, and those others dedicated to latest advances in the technologies we love the most, now we are organizing events aimed at improving the quality of our skills as developers, and trying to build new things in this new learning process. One of the initiatives we have started is called "Android Best Practices", a study group where the best techniques for programming in android are discussed and put into practice through workshops on saturdays mornings.

We made ​​7 events so far this year, and we are preparing many more. At this point we can't tell you what they are, just that something really big is coming .If you follow us, this year will be the best ever :)

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