TIMOTHY JORDAN: Hello, and welcome
to "The Developer Show."
This is your TLDR.
Project Tango is hosting workshops
to help bring indoor location apps to life.
You may remember our visit to one of these workshops
a couple episodes ago.
It was really cool.
Follow the link to read more and submit your own idea.
To help your business grow, we are significantly
increasing the size limits of all Google Compute Engine block
storage products, including up to three terabytes of local SSD
and 64 terabytes of persistent disk per virtual machine.
Check out the post for more details.
If you enjoy debating the merits of the spark and data flow
programming models, you get excited at the idea
of processing terabytes in seconds with zero setup,
or simply want to learn how to use the infrastructure
that powers Google for your data processing work,
this new blog on big data is for you.
Dart 1.14 is now available and contains
a number of additions and improvements
across our core libraries and tools,
including progress towards eliminating
symbolic links and a new way to access package assets easily
and reliably.
The newest Chrome Beta release includes CSS custom properties,
background sync with service workers,
and new ECMAScript 2015 features.
Check out the blog post and the Beta.
Over the last couple weeks, we've
published a bunch of new articles
on our Web Updates page.
Check out all the great new content,
including information on ECMAScript proxies,
controlling font performance, and more.
Invalid activity consists of any clicks or impressions
that may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs
or a publisher's earnings.
Learn how you can avoid invalid activity with these quick tips.
Intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism
but comes from the managed interaction
of a diverse variety of resourceful agents.
This and other big ideas came from the work of Marvin Minsky,
a pioneer in artificial intelligence
and winner of Turing Award in 1969.
He recently died at the age of 88.
For more on Minsky's work, check out this great article
by the "The New York Times."
Women Techmakers is Google's global program
for women in tech and is hosting 14 summits at Google offices,
and 100 meet-ups are expected with Google Developer groups
globally to celebrate International Women's
Day in March and April.
Follow the link and apply to attend.
They're going to be awesome.
That's your TLDR for this week.
Now, you may notice that I'm in front
of a highly refined and sophisticated podcast studio.
We've taken down the Android UI toolkit fan art,
but you can still probably guess this is where Chet Haas and Tor
Norbye record their podcast "Android Developers Backstage."
I talked shop with Chet and Tor earlier today,
and this is how it went.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Hello, and welcome to "Android Developers Backstage,"
the podcast.
I'm Chet Haase from--
-I'm Tor Norbye from the Android [INAUDIBLE] team.
-We're kind of backstage at "Android Developers Backstage,"
which is pretty neat.
This is your clubhouse.
-Actually, this is the backstage and the front stage.
We're engineers.
We get one stage.
-So let's talk about "Android Developers Backstage."
What is it?
How'd you come up with the idea?
It's been around for two years.
-Yeah.
-Are you filling a need here, or is this your hobby?
-Are we-- I don't want to think about that too deeply.
Has my life been worthwhile, or is it just
a pile of meaninglessness?
I'm just going to go home make a warm bath with--
-It's actually fun for us because it's
a way for us to talk to people that we work with,
but we don't really know what they do.
And this is the perfect excuse to ask all the dumb questions
that we wouldn't probably otherwise admit to not knowing.
-Actually. yeah, the funnest part of the show
is that we're actually learning about stuff.
I think there the reason it works, at least I'm
going to pretend that it actually
works for people, because the whole point of the show
is to teach people or educate people or help people
understand deeper parts of the platform, the bigger
picture of how Android works, how
technology works in general, APIs, deeper stuff, whatever.
And it's not like we're pretending, giving
prompting questions so that those people can
talk to the audience.
No, they're talking to us.
We don't know either.
So we talk to people who are domain experts
in the thing that they do.
And then they tell us about it, and along the way,
they happen to be speaking into a microphone.
We happen to be recording it.
And hopefully, other people are benefiting
from the conversation as well.
-Who's the most surprising guest that came on?
And it's like, I had no idea that was true about Android.
-For me, it was one of the early episodes.
It was on security.
And I wasn't expecting to be as fun as it was.
But that episode with Adrian Ludwig on security,
didn't he have some background?
He'd been working for like the--
-NSA or CIA?
- --yeah, CIA or something.
And he was just totally-- he would
talk about things I didn't think he would talk about,
like what we thought of virus checkers on Android
and things like.
So I remember that episode.
I was really surprised by how it was just surprisingly exciting.
-So a couple things, I think the episode in particular
that I though that we could have just gone on for days,
and we actually did break it into two was art.
So we had Anwar on to talk about garbage collectors,
which being a graphics person, I wouldn't think that I would
find inherently interesting, because there
are no pixels involved.
But it's fascinating actually, the way the runtime works,
the way garbage collection works,
the way you can optimize these things,
the way things have gotten better over time.
So we just sort of went on and on and on,
and it was an hour and a half later.
-So what you think is the coolest thing happening
in the development community right now,
not the stuff that we're making available via the platform,
but the coolest thing that developers
are doing with Android?
-Well, so if you're only just doing the platform,
then I would say Android Studio, clearly.
Because that's not the platform, but it's something
that is super exciting.
-Yeah, and the speed improvements
are incredible with instant run.
-I don't know, I mean, the great thing about the platform,
it's such a huge ecosystem with developers is people
do all kinds of crazy stuff.
-I think that's the thing with Android that's
really cool is that every week or so there's something just
really surprising that somebody's doing with Android
that's really, really cool.
-I think actually one of the guests that we had
on that was surprising to us, or we
knew about it going into the studio,
but the nearby stuff I was really cool
was like using audio as like a transmission protocol.
-The ultrasonic audio.
-Yeah, that was such a neat hack.
-Well, what I think is really neat about that
is blending that with Bluetooth, low energy, and other things
sort of in the background.
And so you get that stuff, no matter how it happens.
I think that's what's really cool.
So I think we're nearly out of time.
Is there anything else you want to tell people about "Android
Developers Backstage" that you don't
get to talk about on the show?
-Listen?
-Yeah, that's what I like about podcasts,
that I can listen to podcasts while I'm driving or doing
dishes or whatever.
So it's a good way to get more technical knowledge
while it's downtime.
-I think that's all the time that we have.
Chet, Tor, thank you very much for taking the time
to chat with me about stuff and things.
And for all of you out there, if you haven't already,
please subscribe to the "Android Developers Backstage"
podcast for all the inside scoop on everything Android.
-It's on your favorite podcast client.
It's also-- we have a blog, where
we publish show notes and really exciting pictures.
So check it out wherever you can find it.
-Cool, you'll find all the links in the description below.
Things again, guys.
-Thanks.
[END PLAYBACK]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And if you have any questions for anybody
here at the Googleplex, remember to use the hashtag askDevShow.
I'm Timothy Jordan, and I'll see you next week.
[MUSIC PLAYING]