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SPEAKER: Jason.
JASON TITUS: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Very great to get a chance to meet all of you--
already had a couple of good conversations
to hear the unique challenges you all face.
So I had kind of one of the coolest jobs
in the world in that I get to work
with a team that is engaged with developers
all around the world.
So people in pretty much any area of the world--
big countries, small countries, rural, urban--
people who are trying to figure out how to use technology
to solve problems they see.
And what we see is as our programs now
reach over a million developers in person every year.
We have actual groups and face-to-face contact
with folks in 140 countries around the world.
And it's truly inspiring to see the work that these teams do.
And importantly the feedback that by working with them
we're able to get.
One of the things that we as a team, as you were just hearing,
really value is the connection that we
get both as being able to enable people
but also to understand what we're doing right and wrong.
As Google, we're here, we have people.
I think our team is people in 32 countries.
But many of the products are built far away
from where the people are using them.
So it's really useful for us to actually hear--
I was talking to somebody a few minutes ago
who's at a ag school.
And a lot of the folks there are coming
to their day-by-day challenges with a different set
of problems than a Google engineer
sitting in this building in Sunnyvale.
And so how do we bring that back?
How do we bring those experiences and concerns
and say, hey, this works really great for people who are
solving this kind of problem.
But it really doesn't work for me here.
So that is an important role that we feel we have as a team.
And you can always help us with that
by bringing that feedback to us.
So today, I really want to, as well, welcome all of you
and thank you for making the time to come out here.
I definitely recognize that long ago if you can believe that
long ago, I was actually a student.
And I actually organized student groups in a regional
across multiple states and saw how difficult it is to task
that you all are taking on.
How do you get people to come to meetings?
How do you work the university?
How do you think about succession
and how you will actually keep the group going
after you leave and these are all really hard challenges.
And you're trying to do it at the same time
as you're actually trying to go to school
and learn your own skills.
So I want to thank you.
And hopefully, you'll see that what
we're trying to do with this program is help you learn
the skills that will be useful for you to take
the many of the theoretical things you've been learning
and actually put them into practical work.
So, ooh--
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Totally describe--
JASON TITUS: Some of you may have seen this.
This gives a sense of some of the things
you can do with what you learned.
- --getting my nails done.
And lately, I've been into machine learning using
convolutional neural networks.
[GIGGLES] I don't know what you're laughing at me.
- Since childhood, she's always wanted to know everything.
- Why is that?
How is that?
What's it do?
She just wants to be always learning, moving,
doing different stuff.
- I haven't always been into computer science.
But my mom grows rose bushes in my front yard.
Every season they get disease.
And then my mom and I would have to diagnose it.
- Knowing Shaza, she wanted to do something about it.
- I had the idea as a potential thing
I could do for my research class with Miss Son.
- Why anyone would sit around their summer vacation teaching
a machine to identify plants--
not sure, but that was what she wanted to do.
- I wanted to have a way people could diagnose plant diseases
just by taking a photo of it.
And so that's when I started looking into TensorFlow.
I'd watch different tutorials and read blog posts
every night,
- Shaza took it upon herself to do all the background
research necessary and then start to ask, what can this
really do?
- plantMD works when the user takes a picture of the plant.
And it tells you what plant is and whether it's
healthy or diseased.
And if it is diseased, what disease it is.
- My first question was, is it an app
that's only on your phone?
And she's like, no, somebody has downloaded this app
and using it.
That was like, wow, something that I just was so proud.
- I don't think you have to be a super genius
to get into coding.
Really, anyone can do it with an idea and with perseverance.
I feel like open source technology
and the wealth of information on the internet
is empowering my generation.
I know that I can do anything I put my mind to.
And so can anybody else.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
JASON TITUS: So I imagine all of you
have seen or know of examples or have had that yourself
where the idea that you have--
some problem you're so excited about or interested in--
and you can start applying the things you've learned to it.
The team asked if maybe I could share
some of my own personal journey and that maybe that might
be a helpful thing just to understand
how a path can happen through the world of technology.
And I would certainly say my path
has been a wildly weaving one.
So they have not even seen these slides.
So I'm sorry.
You be the judge.
Long ago, I was like, many kids interested
in lots of different stuff.
This is when I was 11.
And I could've gone any different direction
at that point.
I had lots of things I thought were interesting.
But I was pretty lucky that my father actually
thought for some reason that I might
be interested in computers.
And so as an 11-year-old, he sign me up
for a community college coding program, which I stood out in.
But it really, when I actually sat down and started coding it,
it created this whole new world of, wow,
you can put whatever you want and control
this thing to make it do all sorts of things.
And so within a year, I had a bulletin board
with hundreds of users.
And I was coding on my own and enjoying it.
But there weren't any kind of communities, really,
at that point, except for bulletin boards.
And so there wasn't a lot of easy way
for me to continue learning.
And so I would say progression sort of
didn't go very far after that for a while
until when I was in college.
The internet had been around for a while since the '70s.
But something happened in the early '90s that transformed it.
And I'm sure you all know I'm talking
about the worldwide Gopher network.
So when the web came out, actually,
just around the same time and maybe a little bit earlier,
something called Gopher came out, which
was to me transformational.
It was the first time you had the idea that you
could look at a menu of items, and you
have no idea where they are.
They could be anywhere in the world.
You could say one line is to a connection
to a computer system in Copenhagen. Another search is
a ways, a text index of a system in Virginia.
And so my friends and I put together an environmental thing
we called EcoGopher where we indexed
mailing lists of environmental information,
found all the fact sheets on toxic chemicals in the world
from the EPA and such and made that all available.
And that was like, '92.
And for me, the world changed.
And all of a sudden there were opportunities
that hadn't been there before.
And I say this, because guess what.
This continues to happen.
And I would argue it happens faster and faster.
So for me, I was not about knowing
how to program on an Apple II Plus that
was the valuable skill.
It was knowing how to recognize when interesting things
were happening.
And there was opportunities to change.
So I actually left, hopped out of school,
and started a company.
I was pretty stylish back then as you can tell.
And my company is focused on the idea of open data.
I had already seen that there is all these amazing things.
If you just make information available,
then you can start cutting and slicing and putting it together
in ways that haven't been thought of before.
And so we started working.
We did the programs or the projects to the government.
We did things with big companies.
And we are always trying to figure out what
was our product going to be?
What we're going to build to make that was interesting?
And this was '96, '97.
That was reasonably early.
And so I would say at that point kind of viewed
as if people were to talk to me, they'd say,
oh, this is a data guy.
He knows all about how to cut and slice data.
What we put together ended up being
really valuable and interesting to a company called Altavista,
which probably most of you have never used.
But if you can imagine there was a time when Google was not
the top search company.
It was Altavista.
It was sort of the first big search engine that came out.
And so my friends and I who had built this company,
we all moved out to California.
And at that point, as I got into that company,
people said, oh, this person, Jason, he's the search guy.
I ran the core search indexing team for Altavista.
Later on, I went to Yahoo.
They wanted to add search to Yahoo Mail.
So I built search for Yahoo Mail.
And so I was the search guy.
I was the person who was interested
in interesting problems.
And pretty soon, I ended up overseeing
sort of messenger and mail and a bunch of things
that were happening there.
And when I got bored with that, my family and I
moved to London.
And I started working a little app
called Shazam which hopefully some of you have heard of.
And that was interesting, because it
was where technology--
suitably advanced technology felt like magic to users.
The goal was not to make something complex
with powerful algorithms and all this.
It was that.
But the goal was to make something
that in a simple, easy way solved user problems.
And that's what drew me to it.
And so I spent a fair amount of time really looking
at how do you make that fast?
How do you make that easy?
It was a whole new thing.
And then I routinely ended up going
to big music industry events and the Grammys and all of this.
And folks would say, oh, Jason, he's a music industry guy.
And so it's interesting how, as you follow your interests,
if you follow your interest, you can be true to yourself.
You shouldn't let yourself be sort of shoehorned
into a particular role.
So, for example, then I came to Google.
And I was working on social products.
And at some forum, people were saying,
hey, here's all the things we're doing for developers.
And it's really amazing.
And I was like, hey, new guy here.
Actually, it's not all amazing.
I could think of but this doesn't work.
That doesn't work.
What are we going to do about that?
Have a little bit of career advice.
Sometimes that kind of thinking can get you in trouble.
So a couple of weeks later, Sundar, who's now our CEO,
came by and said, you seem to have
some ideas on what we should be doing about around developers.
Why don't you start a group focused on making
Google great for developers?
And so that's really what I've been doing since then for about
the last 4 and 1/2 years.
And, as I mentioned, in the end, that ends up being about one
of the coolest jobs I know of and certainly
one of my favorite things I've ever been able to do,
because it gives me a chance to work with folks like yourselves
all around the world.
So I hope that gives you an idea of a path.
And I want to reiterate that the thing that
is I think the trap that people fall into
is thinking that because they're good at one thing
that they should just keep doing that thing.
And I would just always to encourage you to keep learning.
And as you work, yet, you're in such a great spot
to be meeting lots of different people of skill sets,
see what other people they think is interesting, because often,
that's where you're going to find the signal of what
the next big thing is or the next big opportunity for you.
So now that I'm here, and I get to work with our Google
Developers team all around the world,
want to help you understand a little bit of how
what you're doing, as DSC leads, connects into a broader
community.
So beyond DSC, we also have a number of community programs.
So we have Women Techmakers where
we have over 100,000 women around the world who
we support with programs and speakers and resources.
We have our Google Developer Experts Program
where we actually help folks in the community
and find the folks who are experts in particular areas.
And then they share their knowledge
with others around the world.
And I can say in each of these areas,
I have met amazing folks.
I certainly like, I can remember meeting GDs and Jakarta
and Lagos and all around who've blown me away
both with their knowledge and their passion.
And then we have our GDG groups which are actually
all around the world and are probably the most similar
directly with what you're doing in DSC.
And so we want to really encourage
you to be thinking both that what you're working on now.
And how you're engaged with working with your students
at your university.
But also consider that going forward,
there's always opportunities to connect with these broader
communities and that it should be a great opportunity
to look at are there other ways to have folks
who are at a university that has many people who go off
to the town they're in or big city
nearby that it's probably worthwhile to reach out
to the GDGs in those areas and the GDs, as well,
and see if maybe you can share speakers,
interact, because I think that will probably
be interesting for you, interesting for them
and probably create a lot of opportunities
for both increased learning, as well as, in reality,
a lot of great opportunities to network
that can help in your career and the career of the folks
in your group.
So with that, I want to thank you.
This is, I hope, will be very useful.
And as we've said, this is both a chance for you
to learn some things about how to do what you're doing better
but also to give real, honest feedback on what we can do
better going forward.
This is an early program.
And I think it has immense future based on all
the great work you're doing.
Thank you.
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