At Google’s headquarters Saturday, Bosco So from San Francisco and Anil Pattni from Orange County were collaborating on an online social game that would allow groups of kids with diabetes to compete with each other to stay current on their diet and medication. Before this weekend the two were complete strangers.
A few feet away, Palo Alto middle school students Alex Hwang, 13, and Panini Raman, 14, musician friends, were crafting an audio application for easily composing music on a computer. Despite being up until 3 a.m. the boys were back coding at 7 Saturday morning, they reported with evident pride.
And nine time zones away in Munich, Germany, Nils Hitze and a team of software developers were working on a location-based combat game that would use some of the newest features of HTML5, the next big revision of the computer language that supports the Web.
About 170 independent software developers converged on the Googleplex this weekend, pitching tents as they did last summer on the verdant lawns of the Internet giant’s Mountain View campus for a three-day computer coding marathon in which bleary eyes are a red badge of honor. What’s different about this year’s camp-out, which ends today, is that it’s global, with developer teams in Germany, Mexico, Australia and other countries checking in through a video feed while building their own applications.
Colorful nylon tents dotted the lawn outside a building in a corner of Google’s campus Saturday afternoon, while inside, developers, some working alone, but most working in groups as large as 10 or more, hunched over their laptops.
Going global
The event, organized through grass-roots communities of programmers called Google Technology User Groups (GTUGs), is one measure of the rapidly expanding global reach of Google, which now gets a majority of its revenue from outside the United States. The first Mountain View-based GTUG launched in January 2008, and while there were a few random GTUG groups outside the United States before last year, Google did not formally launch the international program until its annual developer conference in May 2009. There are now GTUGs in 56 countries.
“All this interest has grown up over the last year,” said Stephanie Liu, who shepherds Google’s ever-spreading international network of GTUGs. “We decided to see how much interest there was, and there’s a lot of interest.”
A global network of independent programmers is crucial to Google because of the explosive growth of smartphones that run its Android software, and the continued expansion of its Chrome Web browser. Just like Apple’s iPhone App Store, the Android Market includes thousands of smartphone apps consumers can download. Google is expected to soon launch a Chrome Web Store where consumers will be able to buy games and other online apps for desktops and laptops.
Google depends on a far-flung system of independent developers to dream up the apps that will keep consumers buying software in those online stores. Liu also noted that developers in other countries can not only produce software products tailored to their home country, but can also serve as evangelists for new Google products.
Artist in residence
In one room full of programmers at Google on Saturday afternoon, San Francisco new-media artist David Newman was using an iPad to create digital portraits of GTUG campers. Newman, who does digital portraits that document life in Silicon Valley, said he wanted to be the “artist-in-residence” at the camp-out to capture its spirit of creativity.
“They’re all ready to spend the weekend to create something new. They inspire me,” Newman said.
The global sweep of this year’s GTUG camp-out sometimes made it tough for some developers to stay in sync with Mountain View.
In Germany, Hitze had just left a group of nine software developers hacking deep into the night on a problem with detecting overlapping polygons. It was early afternoon in Mountain View.
Still, to be directly connected to Google’s headquarters for an event “is great,” Hitze said in an instant-message conversation. “Even though we’re a bit ahead due to the time zone shifting, it is great to see all the ideas of the different chapters running through the Web.”
Developers will demonstrate their work starting at 4:30 p.m. today at http://j.mp/campout-live.
