Event speakers

GDD Europe featured a lineup of talks given by both Googlers and the developer community on a wide range of Google products.

Distinguished Engineer & Senior Engineering Director

Behshad leads a team of over 100 Engineers focused on developing the Google Assistant, one of the company’s most innovative and challenging computer science projects. The Assistant enables people to get things done in their world by talking to Google in a natural way. Behshad joined Google Zurich in 2006 and has worked on various areas of Search, including Google Ranking, Alerts, Conversational Search, and Now on Tap.

Prior to Google, Behshad graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, where he also received his PhD in Bioinformatics in 2002. He was later a post-doc researcher at the Max Plank Institute for Molecular Genetics, focusing on algorithmic comparative genomics.

Product Manager

Tilke Judd is a Product Manager working on the Google assistant. During her 5 years at Google she was a product manager on Google Alerts, Google Search and the Google Assistant. Prior to Google she completed her BS, MS and PhD in Computer Graphics from MIT while dabbling in digital video making and competitive ballroom dancing. Originally from the United States, she now lives and works in Zurich. When not at work she and her husband like to take their twin toddlers hiking.

Program Manager, Firebase

Francis Ma is a Group Product Manager at Google and leads the Firebase product management team. Prior to his current role, he was a PM lead on Android focusing on building the Android developer ecosystem.

Before joining Google in 2011, Francis was an entrepreneur and tech startup co-founder. Prior to that, he worked at Amazon.com as a software engineering manager.

Francis earned his bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Software Engineer

Ewa Maciaś is leading a team that builds a Frontend of Google Cloud Compute. She has 10 years experience in building management consoles for developers running services on Google Infrastructructure. First, as a developer she delivered an internal application for Google engineers, now, as a manager is building an application for external Users. She believes that even the most powerful platform can be made easy and pleasurable to consume

Product Manager, Chrome

Tal is a product manager on the Chrome for Android team. Prior to joining the Chrome team, she worked on Google Apps and Local Search. She earned her bachelors degree in Neurobiology with a secondary focus in Computer Science at Harvard.

Developer Ecosystem Lead Europe

Dirk Primbs is the Google Developers Ecosystem European lead and has been in the industry for over 15 years. He is a web technologist,​ accomplished startup mentor,​ author and speaker with a passion for connected systems, the web and technology at large.

Developer Advocate

Sara is a Developer Advocate on Google's Cloud Platform team, focusing on big data and machine learning. She helps developers build awesome apps through demos, online content, and events. Sara has a bachelor’s degree in Business and International Studies from Brandeis University. When she's not programming she can be found on a spin bike, listening to the Hamilton soundtrack, or finding the best ice cream in New York.

Engineering Director

Sowmya incubates and grows strategic initiatives in the consumer space at Google and is active in empowering and enabling women and girls in technology. In her 10+ years at Google, Sowmya founded and led YouTube Kids, YouTube Music, and YouTube Live, and has been critical in expanding YouTube’s revenue stream from an ad-based model to a paid-subscription model.

Sowmya started her career at Oracle as an engineer in the core database group working on Oracle 8i. She was promoted yearly and led global engineering teams

VP, Developer Product Group

Jason is the Vice President for the Developer Product Group at Google. Before that, he worked as the Chief Technology Officer at Shazam and as the Vice President of Communications for Mail, Messenger, and PIM at Yahoo. Prior to that, Jason co-founded iAtlas, a start-up acquired by Alta Vista.

Jason has extensive experience in engineering, product management and design for large-scale consumer products, and has managed large global teams.

Engineering Director, Developer Tools and Signals

Mícheál is leading the software engineering efforts of a group of teams based in Munich who work on tools for developers (DevTAS). The primary users of these tools are internal Google engineers, but some of the tools are also open sourced and used as part of Google Cloud Platform by external developers, this includes Bazel (build) and Gerrit (code review).

Mícheál worked previously as co-founder and CTO FeedHenry, acquired by Red Hat in October 2014. FeedHenry developed a Node.js based platform for enterprise mobility. Mícheál was one the co-founders of Telecommunications Software & Systems Group in 1996, a research centre in Waterford Institute of Technology, in Ireland, that has been very successful in EU and Irish funded R&D projects with 160 developers and researchers at its maximum.

Session speakers

Engineer, Firebase

Sarah created early web platforms for realtime apps with Shockwave and Flash Media Server. She led the mobile development company, Blazing Cloud, developing many native mobile and web apps. She now leads the Cloud for Mobile server engineering as part of the Firebase team at Google. Sarah believes that software should be seriously fun, and that there is magic in making powerful tools that spark imagination and challenge us all to keep learning and inventing.

Cloud Developer Advocate

Mete is a Developer Advocate at Google, currently focused on helping developers with Google Cloud Platform. As a longtime Java and a recent C# developer, he likes to compare the two ecosystems. Prior to Google, he worked at Microsoft, Skype, Adobe, EMC, and Nokia building apps and services on various web, mobile, and cloud platforms. Originally from Cyprus, he currently lives in Greenwich, not too far away from the prime meridian.

Google Developer Expert

AMahdy is an an international technical speaker, Google developer expert (GDE), trainer and developer advocate. Passionate about Web and Mobile apps development, including PWA, offline-first design, in-browser database, and cross platform tools. Also interested in Android internals such as building custom ROMs and customize AOSP for embedded devices. www.amahdy.net

Developer Advocate

Paul Bakaus is a Web Developer Advocate at Google and spends most of his time making the web fast and user-friendly, currently by supporting the AMP project.

Lead Language Designer of Kotlin at JetBrains

Andrey Breslav has been leading the design and development of the Kotlin programming language at JetBrains since 2010 when the project started.

Developer Advocate

Marc is a Developer Advocate for media. He works with content partners on media apps for Android and Android TV as well as on ExoPlayer's streaming technology.

Program Manager

Sarah Clark leads the web team inside Google Developer Training and teaches the Progressive Web Apps course. She's always looking for hard problems facing developers and working to make them easier.

Cloud Developer Advocate

Marc builds tools, demos, codelabs, and other things to make Google Cloud Platform easier and more fun to use. Originally from New Jersey, Marc has lived in Columbus and Seattle for a while, and now lives and works in London, UK.

He coauthored a book about Google Compute Engine and wrote the product announcement demo. Previously, he developed communication systems at Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies. He's very interested in education, teaching, and applying technology (like spaced repetition) to enhance the learning experience.

Developer Programs Engineer

Gus Class is a Developer Programs Engineer for Google Cloud. He has worked on the developer experience for a number of developer products spanning Google, including Google+, Photos, Hangouts, Cardboard, Tango, Play Games Services, Android, and Google Cloud Machine Learning APIs. When he's not working, he DJs and creates music, rock climbs and bikes, plays and creates video games, and builds robots.

Developer Programs Engineer

Shuyang is a Developer Programs Engineer working on outreach and developer tools for the Google Assistant and Actions on Google. He has extensive experience in creating complex frontend web interfaces and backend Node.js servers using JavaScript and TypeScript. Before Google, Shuyang worked as a Software Engineer at Intuit and several startups while pursuing numerous personal projects. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

Developer Advocate

WESLEY CHUN is author of the bestselling "Core Python" (corepython.com) series, co-author of "Python Web Development with Django" (withdjango.com), and articles for Linux Journal, CNET, InformIT. In addition to being a Developer Advocate at Google, he runs CyberWeb (cyberwebconsulting.com), specializing in Python training. Wesley has over 25 years of programming, teaching, and writing experience plus was an original Yahoo!Mail engineer, holding degrees in CS, Math, and Music from the University of California. He is a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation and reachable on Google+ (+WesleyChun) or Twitter (@wescpy).

Developer Programs Engineer

Mark works at Google as a Developer Programs Engineer for TensorFlow. Before that he spent 9 years building embedded ML models for aircraft.

CEO, Posse

David is Founding Partner of Posse, a NYC-based digital agency that designs and develops web and mobile applications. Posse was one of the first agencies certified by Google.

Developer Advocate

Sam Dutton is a Developer Advocate for Google Chrome, based in London. Sam currently spends most of his time helping build Web training resources, and he also specialises in images, media APIs and WebRTC.

Engineer

James is a full-stack developer with a passion for Open Source. He works on Firebase at Google where he helps with Developer Relations, documentation, workshops, and maintenance of the Firebase SDKs. James helped write the documentation, ran usability studies, and wrote samples for Google Cloud Functions for Firebase.

Design Advocate

Yasmine Evjen is a Design Advocate at Google, helping other designers create human-centered experiences on Google's platforms. Proponent of pen before pixel, she uses the Google Design Sprint methodology to help teams co-create, test, and build successful products.

Prior to Google, she led user experience design efforts to build cross-platform products for start-ups, non-profits, and large corporations. Highlighted on Computerworld's Android Experts as "the person behind one of Android's most powerful voices,” Yasmine bridges the gap between design and technology to bring stories to life.

Google Developers Expert

Rebecca Franks is the Android Engineering Lead at Dynamic Visual Technologies based in Johannesburg, South Africa. With over five years of experience in developing Android applications, she is also a Google Developer Expert for Android and IoT. She loves to travel and to bake in her spare time.

Developer Advocate

Stephen is a Developer Advocate on the Angular Team at Google. Stephen works to solve real world problems faced by developers and businesses, and to represent the needs of the community within the team.

Developer Advocate

Daniel leads the Android advocacy team, taking on many roles throughout his seven-year tenure including the development of our Udacity courseware, and working with Games developers to improve the Android experience. He enjoys working with our internal teams to improve the Android development experience.

Software Engineer

Andrew Gasparovic is a member of the Applied Machine Intelligence (AMI) team at Google Research Europe in Zurich. He is currently building infrastructure to enable transfer learning at scale. Prior to AMI, he worked on distributed storage systems like Bigtable at Google in New York and low-latency transaction processing at ITA Software in Cambridge, MA. Andrew is a private pilot and enjoys exploring Europe with his wife.

Training Specialist

Nikita is a passionate training specialist and Android enthusiast, working on developing quality Android training both in online and instructor led formats. He is committed to helping developers around the world learn cutting edge skills and master mobile development techniques.

Developer Programs Engineer

Ewa is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. She is a frontend engineer, focused mainly on Progressive Web Apps development and analysis, always keen to investigate common scenarios and emerging app design patterns.

Developer Advocate

Ido Green is an entrepreneur who loves to build companies and help developers.

Ido has been working in technology since 1994, and right now, he's a Developer Advocate at Google, focusing on Google Assistant. Ido has been a Solution Architect at Google Cloud and is cofounder and CTO of High Gear Media.

VP of Developer Advocacy at JetBrains

Developer and creator of many things OSS, Hadi's passions include web development and software architecture. Has authored a couple of books and a few courses, and has been speaking at industry events for nearly 15 years. He's currently at JetBrains leading the Developer Advocacy team and spends as much time as he can writing code.

Conversation Designer

Now a Conversation Designer on the Google Assistant, Kimberly spent the last three years at Google as a UX researcher. During that time, she conducted discovery and also iterative and evaluative research for Google Assistant and other Google products in both multimodal (voice and touch) and voice-only environments.

Site Reliability Engineer

Steffen Hanikel is a Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Flixbus and responsible for the maintenance and evolution of their Kubernetes clusters and their integration into the company infrastructure. Previously he worked as a Software Engineer on core features of the services powering Flixbus.

In his spare time he likes to spend his time porting Java's Date Time code to PHP for the Celest-Time project.

Developer Advocate

As Developer Advocate for API.AI, Dan teaches engineers to build conversational experiences using the magic of machine learning. He’s worked with conversational UX since 2010.

Before landing at Google, Dan cofounded America’s first insect-farming technology company, Tiny Farms Inc. He’s mentored hundreds of software and technology students at Hack Reactor, a top coding academy, and held a faculty position at Birmingham City University at age 22.

Dan earned a bachelor’s degree in computer networks and security from Birmingham City University, graduating with first-class honors.

Developer Advocate

Wojtek is a Developer Advocate at Google and works closely with the Android Studio team to provide outreach on new Studio and Tools releases and framework features. He enjoys looking for ways to make apps more usable, mostly through better development patterns and code optimizations.

Cloud Developer Advocate

Robert Kubis is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform based in London, UK, specializing in Container, Storage, and Scalable technologies. Before joining Google, Robert collected over 10 years of experience in software development and architecture. He has driven multiple full-stack application developments at SAP with a passion for distributed systems, containers, and databases. In his spare time, he enjoys following tech trends and good restaurants, traveling, and improving his photography skills.

Developer Programs Engineer

Jonathan is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google, currently working on IoT/Android Things. With about 5 years of experience developing apps and libraries on Android, he makes developers' lives easier by vetting APIs, creating samples, and writing libraries used by 3rd parties in order to help foster Google's IoT platform.

Business Development Manager

Alexey helps app developers in CEE build better apps and find success on Google Play.

Engineer, Google Cloud Platform

Kathy is an engineer on the Cloud Datastore team at Google, where she enables developers to easily scale and manage their application data. She holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Rice University, and outside of tech can be found swing dancing.

Product Manager

Seth is a Product Manager on Flutter at Google.

Developer Advocate

Hoi is the Lead Developer Advocate for Android Wear and is an IoT panel expert for the Institute of Engineering and Technology. He worked on the launch of Google Cast / Chromecast in Europe, Android Wear, Google Glass and the Google beacon platform.

Before Google, he founded Exahive disrupting the mobile commerce market with new tech and business models. Hoi was an Equity Research VP at Deutsche Bank and Citigroup advising technology executives.

Hoi holds a Master and Bachelors in Space Engineering from the University of Cambridge.

Developer Advocate

Ben is a Developer Advocate at Google, where he’s working to help the Web be faster and more beautiful. Prior to Google, he worked at the New York Times and AOL, and before that he was a full-time musician. He earned a BA in Computer Science at Harvard and a PhD in Music at the University of California. Rumor is that he still runs a band called Ancient Babies.

Developer Advocate

Florina is an Android Developer Advocate at Google, helping developers architect clean, testable apps using the Architecture Components libraries. She has been working with Android for eight years, previous work covering news at upday, payment solutions at payleven and navigation services at Garmin.

Senior Software Engineer

Agnieszka is the lead developer for the Android Wear Support Library and UI Toolkit team. She works on APIs and new UI components for wearables, making developing for round screens easier. In her spare time, she enjoys yoga and all flavors of sci-fi.

Developer Programs Engineer

Renato is the Developer Relations Tech Lead for Google IoT platforms. He has been at Google for five years, previously working on products like Chrome and Android Auto. He is now focused on making Android Things a great developer platform for IoT. Before joining Google, he cofounded a couple of start-ups, worked with natural language applied research, and even "coached" a Brazilian robot soccer team, despite not playing soccer.

Developer Programs Engineer

Stephen McDonald is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google Australia, working on open-source tools and projects that help users better leverage the Google Maps APIs. He previously held Technical Lead roles at several startups and large enterprises, and is also the creator of some of the most popular open-source projects for the Django framework.

Developer Programs Engineer

Sachit works on libraries, documentation, and outreach efforts for Actions on Google as a Developer Programs Engineer. He has also supported Android TV and Google Cast. Prior to Google, Sachit was a software engineer working at companies like Bloomberg, Intuit, and Grooveshark. Sachit earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Florida.

Developer Programs Engineer

Brett builds samples, codelabs, documentation and other fun things to encourage developers to use Google Maps to the fullest in their websites and mobile apps. He hails from Sydney, Australia where he has worked across the entire range of companies from Australia’s largest bank to its secretive startups. His most recent work includes tracking the buses at Google I/O, open-sourced as a pair of codelabs: Transport Tracker Backend and Transport Tracker Map. His interests include all things technical, from the kitchen to the browser.

Public Policy & Government Relations Counsel

Danielle is a public policy counsel at Google, where she leads global policy strategy for Android, communications products, developer outreach, and the Internet of Things. Her prior roles included senior legal and advisor roles in the U.S. Senate and the Executive Office of the President. She holds a bachelor of science in electrical engineering, and advanced degrees in law and public policy. Danielle holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Master’s in Public Affairs from Princeton University and a JD from Harvard Law School.

User Experience Designer

Marc is a Senior User Experience Designer at Google, where he has worked on second screen experiences for YouTube, predictive experiences on Google Now, and multimodal (voice and touch) conversational experiences on mobile; most recently for the Google Assistant on the Pixel phone.

Training Specialist

Jen works on the Firebase team at Google. She is a training expert, loves building iOS apps, and recently has been teaching developers how to integrate Cloud Functions into their Firebase apps. Jen's bachelor's degree (magna cum laude) is in mathematics with high honors from Central Connecticut State University. Connect with her on Twitter: @ThatJenPerson.

See her videos at Cloud Functions for Firebase - Firecasts series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-K7zZEsYLkPZHe41m4jfAxUi0JjLgSM.

Developer Advocate

Dave Smith is a Developer Advocate at Google, focused on IoT and the Android Things platform. Over the past decade, he has worked with low-power M2M systems and wireless radio links, and has also built custom applications and system components to run Android on embedded platforms. He has a passion for finding opportunities to make devices, and developers, smarter.

Head of Conversation Design Advocacy & Partnerships

Now leading Conversation Design advocacy for Google, Nandini has created voice experiences for over 17 years in 60+ languages and for 120+ countries. She is passionate about creating an ecosystem of creative technologists to unlock the future of truly enabling interfaces that honor the core, evolved power of human communication.

Mobile Solutions Consultant

Thomas Steiner is a Mobile Solutions Consultant at Google Hamburg, focused on all things Mobile Web. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Polytechnical University of Catalonia, Spain, and for more than ten years has worked on building and architecting technically challenging solutions for some of Google’s largest advertisers and publishers. He blogs at https://blog.tomayac.com/ and tweets as @tomayac.

Design Advocate

Liam is a UI/UX designer based in NYC. He's helped independent developers, start-ups, global corporations, and civic organizations invent or improve innovative, human-centered experiences, and has spoken internationally about the future of UI/UX. Liam is currently a Design Advocate at Google, enabling great design across platforms.

Software Engineer

Santiago is a Developer on the ExoPlayer team. He and his team strive for compelling and stable media experiences across the entire Android ecosystem. His main focus is in HLS and TV content.

Technical Lead

Tom Salter is a Technical Manager in the Daydream Platform and Experiences group at Google, specializing in building tools that make AR and VR developers more productive. Tom has been working in the AR/VR space for nearly 8 years, previously incubating Microsoft’s HoloLens and leading development teams at Microsoft where he built the first generation of Mixed Reality applications with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Prior to working on HoloLens, he worked in the videogame industry on various Microsoft and SEGA titles.

Cloud Developer Advocate

Jen is a Developer Advocate on Cloud at Google. In this role she helps developers build cool stuff on all sorts of platforms. If she’s away from her laptop, she’s probably skating around a roller derby track, or hanging from aerial silk.

Developer Programs Engineer

Shailen is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. He works on Android and his recent focus has been on location and context, background processing, and accessibility.

Google Developers Expert

Lisa Wray is currently consulting at the New York Times. She previously worked at Google on the Developer Relations team and at Genius, a Brooklyn-based startup, where she built their Android app from scratch. She lives in Seattle and loves yoga, dogs, and RecyclerView.

Developer Programs Engineer

Ben is a Developer Programs Engineer at the Android Developer Relations team at Google.

He’s been working with Android since the first public release.

Recently his focus was on Animations, Transitions, Android Instant Apps and Kotlin.

UX Engineer

David is a UX engineer working on the open source Fuchsia project. He uses Flutter (flutter.io) to bring prototypes and production UIs to life. Prior to Google, David ran product at his startup, Vessel Science. Before that, David was a interaction designer at VMware where he started the UX prototyping team. David graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in Digital Media Design.