Few quick notes from Google Next 2017

I had the opportunity to attend Google Next this year. Week after this event I joined Google. Here are some quick notes in no particular order:

• Registration was a pain, long lines. My first tech conference where I had to go through a metal detector.
• Impressive reminder of the core tech underlining Google Cloud (i.e. Borg) and Google’s experience in operating at scale.
• Serious commitment to ML and Data Science: invest in talent/community (Kaggle), vision/leadership (Fei-Fei Li keynote), powerful APIs (i.e. Label/Face Detection, OCR, Explicit Content etc.)
• Feels like the ease of use for Google is more important than time time market (see the above DS APIs but also Spanner UX).
• Clear understanding of data economy’s potential value (goes with the scale comment but the experience was apparent in many sessions/keynotes)
• Open/partner market makes stronger platform (Sam Ramji’s keynote drilled on this best), early hints of this were probably the main reason why I wanted to join Google Cloud team.
• Size/quality of the network (both, cables & tech), globally distributed data systems (specifically latency) are perhaps the best example of the user value here.