GDG Vienna 2013 review and 2014 preview

The year 2013 was a really amazing year for us at GDG Vienna. We had a lot of events and meet-ups, alongside with hackathons and cooperation with many companies and user groups.

• We started in January with an "Introduction to Ingress” held by Anna Kastlunger and a nice tech talk from Sergii Kauk on Google APIs. Followed by February with a tech talk from Gerwin Sturm on Google Cloud Endpoints. It was again Gerwin Sturm who gave in March a talk about Google Glass and the mirror API. Nik Graf from blossom.io reported on his experiences with Dart. And we welcomed Aygul Zagidullina on hangouts who shared with us some Google Glass experience.
• We organized also an AR Drone Hackathon where Kariem Hussein, Timea Turdean and Marc Edem formed a team that worked on controlling the drone with gestures recognized via a webcam, and Gerwin Sturm, Anna Kastlunger, and Shadi Abani worked in their team with the navigation data provided by the drone to give some visual feedback about orientation, altitude and battery state inside of the Chrome App.
• We organized the Google I/O Extended viewing which was one of our greatest event with an attendance of almost 100 people. As in previous years we met in a nice place in Vienna to watch the announcements made at this year's Google I/O - this year it was The Hub. Some of the organizers were in San Francisco and provided us with nice pictures and live reports from there as well!
• In June we had another Google Glass experience with Sergii Kauk and a session on “Responsive Design with GWT” by Timea Turdean. The August meetup with the “Introduction to Graph database” by Marc Edem was also an amazing session.
• The next big event: DevFest Vienna! It was a great 3 days events. In cooperation with the Java Student User Group and the AndroidHeads Vienna we have organized an amazing festivity for developers in mobile, cloud, social & web, including an awesome after-party powered by Cenarion - made possible by the support of Willhaben, PayPal and Google.  Other sponsors were Indoors, Tailored Apps, Codiqa, O'Reilly and Manning Publication. We had the chance to have great speakers and presenters together with time for networking and relaxing. The hackathon on Sunday was also a great success where gifted developers created great applications.
• We ended the year with the Android Native on Intel - a joint event with AndroidHeads Vienna sponsored by Intel, with Marc Edem presenting on Intel optimizations for Android and Kariem Hussein talking about Cloud Endpoints in Java Google App Engine.

2014 has already started with the amazing Dart Flight School Vienna event. And more is planned already:

• Women Tech Makers on 15 March 2014
• Google I/O Extended on 25-26 June 2014
• Participation in CodeEU week from 11 to 17 October 2014
• DevFest Vienna on 18-19 October 2014
• Cooperation at the Pioneers Hackathon in the last week of October
• and (almost) monthly meetups & workshops on various topics


Many thanks to all of you for your participation & support! Without you GDG Vienna could not be this success.

Gerwin Sturm, Kariem Hussein, Marc Edem, Anna Kastlunger, Thomas Bandion, Timea Turdean and Helmuth Breitenfellner.


#gdg #gdgdach #2013 #2014 #gdgvienna