Google Cloud: PostgreSQL community contribution updates

by Dilip Kumar, Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL & Matt Cornillon, Sales EMEA

Google Cloud is deeply committed to the long-term success of the PostgreSQL ecosystem. Our involvement goes beyond providing PostgreSQL managed services; it's also about active participation in the open source communities through technical contributions, leadership in conference committees, and sharing architectural insights that benefit all users. Following is a recap of recent events Google Cloud participated in.

PGConf.dev 2026

Serving as a vital developer-centric hub, PGConf.dev provides a unique opportunity for collaboration with the full assembly of senior PostgreSQL committers. This gathering is essential for aligning technical efforts and shaping the future project roadmap.

Key Highlights

• Participation focused on strategic coordination with PostgreSQL committers regarding logical replication development, and a consultation on global index architecture.
• High community interest confirms the Global Index feature solves a vital architectural requirement for enterprises.
• Established community consensus to pursue a deparsing-based architectural approach for DDL replication.

Google Cloud Sessions

Dilip Kumar, a PostgreSQL contributor from Google Cloud, presenting "Experimenting with a Global Index in PostgreSQL" at pgconf.dev 2026 in Vancouver. He is speaking at a podium next to a presentation slide detailing the Global Index storage architecture and PartitionIdentifier management.

Session Title	Session Type	Speakers/Led by
Experimenting with a Global Index in PostgreSQL: Design, Implementation, and Challenges	Technical Talk	Dilip Kumar
Unconference: Global Indexes	Unconference Session	Dilip Kumar
Unconference: Logical Replication: Warts and Missing Pieces	Unconference Session	Hannu Krosing

PGConf India 2026

Key Highlights

• The three-day conference was divided into a training day followed by two days of sessions. More than 580 participants attended the conference over three days.
• The conference sessions included a mix of keynotes, breakout technical sessions, sponsor sessions, and booth interactions.

Google Cloud Sessions

Session Title	Session Type	Speakers
Database And GenAI	Keynote	Paresh Rathod
Experimenting with a Global Index in PostgreSQL	Technical Talk	Dilip Kumar
GCP - Best home to run PostgreSQL	Sponsor Session	Trusar Borse, Abhijeet Rajkur
Beyond shared_buffers: On-Demand Memory PostgreSQL	Technical Talk	Rajeev Rastogi, Vaibhav Popat
Where is my Memory	Technical Talk	Pushkar Kalidkar
Agentic AI Applications with GCP Databases	Keynote	Abhijeet Rajkur, Rishi Kapoor, Saurabh Gupta

PGDay Paris & PGDay France 2026

France hosts two distinct flagship PostgreSQL events, and Google Cloud is deeply embedded in both as both organizers and technical contributors. While PGDay Paris serves as an international, English-language hub for the European community, PGDay France is a community-driven, traveling event that focuses on the francophone ecosystem, taking place in Toulouse for 2026.

Key Highlights

• Matt Cornillon served on the organization committee for PGDay France, while Yves Colin contributed as a member of the program committee.

Google Cloud Sessions

Session Title	Session Type	Speakers
Creating a "Dungeon Master" with Postgres and MCP	Technical Talk	Matt Cornillon
Create your first AI agent with PostgreSQL	Workshop	Matt Cornillon, Yves Colin

PGDay FOSDEM 2026

FOSDEM PGDay is a prominent open source gathering that brings together developers from across the globe to discuss the latest PostgreSQL advancements. It serves as an essential platform for exploring emerging paradigms in database development.

Key Highlights

• Exploration of how AI-assisted workflows are redefining development beyond standard autocomplete for SQL queries.

Google Cloud Sessions

Session Title	Session Type	Speakers
Vibe-coding with Postgres: really?	Technical Talk	Matt Cornillon

PGConf Belgium 2026

PGConf Belgium 2026 took place at the UCLL Campus Proximus in Haasrode, Belgium, serving as an outstanding learning and networking platform for the local PostgreSQL community and students.

Key Highlights

• The session was selected by faculty as supportive material for a database exam following deep student engagement.

Google Cloud Sessions

Session Title	Session Type	Speakers
Creating a "Dungeon Master" with Postgres and MCP	Technical Talk	Matt Cornillon

Nordic PG Day 2026

Nordic PG Day is the largest PostgreSQL event in the Scandinavian countries. The 2026 edition took place in Helsinki, gathering more than 130 PostgreSQL enthusiasts for a day of deep dives.

Key Highlights

• Google joined as an official Partner-level sponsor for the first time, including a dedicated table booth.

Google Cloud Sessions

Session Title	Session Type	Speakers
Unlock AI Agents with PostgreSQL	Technical Talk	Mats Berglin, Miguel Toscano

Swiss PGDay 2026

Swiss PG Day is the annual event organized by the Swiss PostgreSQL User Group in Rapperswil, Switzerland. The ninth edition featured sessions in both English and German.

Key Highlights

• Demonstration of the physical impact of pushing millions of vectors to PostgreSQL based on a real-world use case.

Google Cloud Sessions

Session Title	Session Type	Speakers
Surviving pgvector in production: a reality check	Technical Talk	Miguel Toscano

Postgres Conference: 2026 San Jose

Since its inception in 2007, the Postgres Conference has served as a cornerstone for advancement, fostering a rich environment for learning and professional networking.

Key Highlights

• Google proudly served as a sponsor for the event.
• Adapting PostgreSQL for the artificial intelligence era demands a transformation in operational approaches. With the rise of natural language tools and vibe coding speeding up development, Agentic AI places advanced demands on production databases. In their presentation, Vikas and Vishal examine how Google Cloud managed services have evolved to handle these workloads, providing architectural strategies and best practices for contemporary AI deployment.

Google Cloud Sessions

Session Title	Session Type	Speakers
Postgres and AI - Stronger Together!	Technical Talk	Vikas Arora and Vishal Bagga

Community Leadership and Committees

Googlers play a vital role in shaping the direction of the most prestigious PostgreSQL developer events. Our leadership in these committees helps ensure that enterprise-grade requirements—such as those needed for large-scale migrations—are part of the global conversation.

• PGConf.dev 2026: Dilip Kumar served on the Program Committee.
• PGConf India 2026: Dilip Kumar was a member of the Paper Selection Committee.
• PGDay France: Matt Cornillon was a member of the organization committee and Yves Colin served as a member of the Program Committee.

Looking Forward

Our commitment remains firm: to turn feedback from these global events into code, reviews, and active community partnerships. We thank the wider PostgreSQL community and the project's committers for their continued collaboration in making PostgreSQL better for everyone.

Acknowledgement

We extend our heartfelt appreciation to our open source community contributors for their outstanding dedication and active participation in making PostgreSQL conferences a great success.

Abhijeet Rajurkar, Darshan Nagarajappa, Dilip Kumar, Hannu Krosing, Mats Berglin, Matt Cornillon, Michael Bautin, Miguel Toscano, Niranjan Shivprasad, Paresh Rathod, Rajeev Rastogi, Vaibhav Popat, Vikas Arora, and Yves Colin

Furthermore, we are deeply grateful to the broader PostgreSQL open-source communities, especially the dedicated conference organizers, committee members, and all supporting sponsors.

Building Skills, Building Community

103 attendees here this week received diversity scholarships! This is the largest investment in diversity for ANY conference EVER — thanks to this incredible committee, @googlecloud, @Azure, @awscloud & @twistlockteam 👏🏼 [LIVE from #KubeCon + #CloudNativeCon] pic.twitter.com/GtxNCjb1g5

— CNCF (@CloudNativeFdn) December 6, 2017

Year after year, we hear from conference attendees that it's not just the content they came for, it's the connections. Meeting new people, getting new perspectives, making new friends (and sometimes hiring them!) is a big part of KubeCon Life. We want to make sure that the Kubecon community is welcoming to people from diverse backgrounds but just being welcoming is not enough: we have to actually do the work to help people get through the door.

The easiest way to help people get through the door is through diversity scholarships. One of the biggest blockers to full participation in our community is just having the resources to get to the room where it happens, and a diversity scholarship—not just a ticket, but travel assistance too—helps increase participation.

Dope. @googlecloud went swagless this Kubecon and sending the funds to the Kubecon diversity scholarship for Barcelona.

Pretty cool instead of getting plastic.

— Amy Codes 🌻 (@TheAmyCode) December 12, 2018

1: Going Swagless

This Kubecon we want you to take away the really important things from the conference: new knowledge and new connections... not just another pen or plastic doodad. (Although to be fair, we will also have plenty of stickers... stickers aren't swag, they're an essential part of Kubecon!)

Google prides itself on being a data-driven company, so when we need to decide where we can spend our dollars to make the most impact and do the most good for the Kubecon community, we turn to the data. We know there is an issue from the CNCF KubeCon report in Seattle 2018 reporting in 11% women (and that’s not even a complete diversity metric). Now looking at the things conference attendees have told us they value about Kubecon, we put together this handy chart to help us guide our decision-making:

	Travel + Conf Ticket Scholarship	Branded Pen
Face to face learning	✅	❌
Career development	✅	❌
OSS community building	✅	❌
Writing tools	❌	✅

We also need to consider externalities when we make our decisions—and going #swagless and dedicating those resources to improving the conversation and community at Kubecon has some positive externalities: less plastic (and lighter luggage going home) is better for the planet, too!

If our work to support diversity and inclusion at Kubecon has inspired you and you want to know what your org can do to participate, there is plenty of room in the #swagless tent for everyone—redirect your swag budget to D&I efforts. Shoutouts to conference organizers like SpringOne that went totally swagless this year!

2: Diversity Lunch + Hack

Pair-Programming table #Diversity lunch #KubeCon 👍👍👍 very great moment ! pic.twitter.com/21rNrqUg5i

— Gaëlle Acas 🐳 (@Gaelleacas) May 22, 2019

Our commitment to a welcoming environment and a diverse community doesn't stop at getting people in the door: we also need to work on inclusion. Our diversity lunch and hack is a place where people can:

• Build their skills through pair programming
• Get installation help
• Do deep-dives on k8s topics
• Connect with others in the community

Our diversity lunch isn't just talking about diversity: it's about working towards diversity through skill-building and creating stronger community bonds. Register here!

We welcomed 220 friends and allies in Barcelona and expect to continue the sold-out streak in San Diego (get your ticket now)!

3: Redirecting Even More

But wait, there's more! We're not just going #swagless, we're also redirecting all the hands-on workshop registration fees ($50) from Anthos Day, Anthos&GKE Lab, OSS: Agones, Knative, and Kubeflow to the diversity scholarship fund. You can build a stronger, more diverse community while you build your skills—a total twofer. (And our workshops are also walking the walk of inclusion by being accessible themselves: if you need support to attend a workshop, whether financial or physical, send us a note.

4: Hiring

Also, one of the best things any company can do to drive D&I is to hire people who will help your company become more diverse, whether as a consultant to help you build your program, or as a team member who will help you bring a wider perspective to your product! Come meet a Googler at any of the activities we are doing during the week to discuss jobs at Google Cloud: g.co/Kubecon.

By: Paris Pittman, Google Open Source

Googlers on the road: CLS and OSCON 2018

Next week a veritable who’s who of free and open source software luminaries, maintainers and developers will gather to celebrate the 20th annual OSCON and the 20th anniversary of the Open Source Definition. Naturally, the Google Open Source and Google Cloud teams will be there too!

Program chairs at OSCON 2017, left to right:
Rachel Roumeliotis, Kelsey Hightower, Scott Hanselman.
Photo used with permission from O'Reilly Media.

This year OSCON returns to Portland, Oregon and runs from July 16-19. As usual, it is preceded by the free-to-attend Community Leadership Summit on July 14-15.

If you’re curious about our outreach programs, our approach to open source, or any of the open source projects we’ve released, please find us! We’re eager to chat. You’ll find us and many other Googlers throughout the week on stage, in the expo hall, and at several special events that we’re running, including:

• TensorFlow Day on Tuesday from 9am-5pm
• Istio Day on Tuesday from 9am-5pm
• Better Together Diversity Networking Lunch on Wednesday from 12:30-1:45pm
• Kubernetes Anniversary Party at Cloud Native PDX Meetup on Wednesday from 7-9pm

Here’s a rundown of the sessions we’re hosting this year:

Sunday, July 15th (Community Leadership Summit)

11:45am   Asking for time and/or money by Cat Allman

Monday, July 16th (Tutorials)

9:00am    Getting started with TensorFlow by Josh Gordon
1:30pm    Introduction to natural language processing with Python by Barbara Fusinska

Tuesday, July 17th (Tutorials)

9:00am    Istio Day opening remarks by Kelsey Hightower
9:00am    TensorFlow Day opening remarks by Edd Wilder-James
9:05am    Sailing to 1.0: Istio community update by April Nassi
9:05am    The state of TensorFlow by Sandeep Gupta
9:30am    Introduction to fairness in machine learning by Hallie Benjamin
9:55am    Farm to table: A TensorFlow story by Gunhan Gulsoy
11:00am  Hassle-free, scalable machine learning with Kubeflow by Barbara Fusinska
11:05am  Istio: Zero-trust communication security for production services by Samrat Ray, Tao Li, and Mak Ahmad
12:00pm  Project Magenta: Machine learning for music and art by Sherol Chen
1:35pm    Istio à la carte by Daniel Ciruli

Wednesday, July 18th (Sessions)

9:00am    Wednesday opening welcome by Kelsey Hightower
11:50am  Machine learning for continuous integration by Joseph Gregorio
1:45pm    Live-coding a beautiful, performant mobile app from scratch by Emily Fortuna and Matt Sullivan
2:35pm    Powering TensorFlow with big data using Apache Beam, Flink, and Spark by Holden Karau
5:25pm    Teaching the Next Generation to FLOSS by Josh Simmons

Thursday, July 19th (Sessions)

9:00am    Thursday opening welcome by Kelsey Hightower
9:40am    20 years later, open source is as important as ever by Sarah Novotny
11:50am  Google’s approach to distributed systems observability by Jaana B. Dogan
2:35pm    gRPC versus REST: Let the battle begin with Alex Borysov
5:05pm    Shenzhen Go: A visual Go environment for everybody, even professionals by Josh Deprez

We look forward to seeing you and the rest of the community there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Googlers on the road: FOSSASIA Summit 2018

In a week’s time, free and open source enthusiasts of all kinds will gather in Singapore for FOSSASIA Summit 2018. Established in 2009, the annual event attracts more than 3,000 attendees, running from March 22nd to 25th this year.

FOSSASIA logo licensed LGPL-2.1.

FOSSASIA Summit is organized by FOSSASIA, a nonprofit organization that focuses on Asia and brings people together around open technology both in-person and online. The organization is also home to many open source projects and is a regular participant in the Google Open Source team’s student programs, Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

Our team is excited to be among those attending and speaking at the conference this year, and we’re proud that Google Cloud is a sponsor. If you’re around, please come say hello. The highlight of our travel is meeting the students and mentors who have participated in our programs!

Here are the Googlers who will be giving presentations:

Thursday, March 22nd

2:00pm Real-world Machine Learning with TensorFlow and Cloud ML by Kaz Sato

Friday, March 23rd

9:30am BigQuery codelab by Jan Peuker
10:30am  Working with Cloud DataPrep by KC Ayyagari
1:00pm Extract, analyze & translate Text from Images with Cloud ML APIs by Sara Robinson
2:00pm    Bitcoin in BigQuery: blockchain analytics on public data by Allen Day
2:40pm What can we learn from 1.1 billion GitHub events and 42 TB of code? by Felipe Hoffa2:40pm Engaging IoT solutions with Machine Learning by Markku Lepisto
2:45pm CloudML Engine: Qwik Start by Kaz Sato
3:20pm Systems as choreographed behavior with Kubernetes by Jan Peuker
4:00pm The Assistant by Manikantan Krishnamurthy

Saturday, March 24th

10:30am Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in by Stephanie Taylor
10:30am Zero to ML on Google Cloud Platform by Sara Robinson
11:00am  Building a Sustainable Open Tech Community through Coding Programs, Contests and Hackathons panel including Stephanie Taylor
11:05am Codifying Security and Modern Secrets Management by Seth Vargo
1:00pm    Open Source Education panel including Cat Allman
5:00pm Everything as Code by Seth Vargo

We look forward to seeing you there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Googlers on the road: FOSDEM 2018

The Google Open Source team is currently enjoying summer weather in Sydney at Linux.conf.au, but soon we return to winter weather and head to Brussels for FOSDEM 2018. FOSDEM is a special event, famous for being non-commercial, volunteer-organized, and free to attend. It’s also huge, attracting more than 5,000 attendees.

FOSDEM logo licensed CC BY 2.0 SE.

This year FOSDEM is particularly special as it falls on top of the 20th anniversary of the open source movement and its steward, the Open Source Initiative. (In case you’re wondering, this September will mark the 35th anniversary of the free software movement.) We’re looking forward to celebrating the occasion!

You’ll find us in the hallways, at satellite events, and at our table in the stands area. You’ll also find some Googlers in the conference schedule, as well as folks sharing their experience of the most recent Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

If you’d like to say hello or chat, swing by our table in Building K. The highlight of our trip is meeting hundreds of the thousands of students and mentors who have participated in our programs!

Below are the Googlers who will be giving presentations:

Saturday, February 3rd
12:30pm  Google’s approach to distributed systems observability for Go by JBD (also at 2:30pm)
3:05pm    Testing and Validating distributed systems by Holden Karau

Sunday, February 4th
10:20am  Regular Expression Derivatives in Python by Michael Paddon
11:30am  Advocating For FOSS Inside Companies a panel including Max Sills
3:00pm    Your Build in a Datacenter by Jakob Buchgraber
4:00pm    Accelerating Big Data Outside of the JVM by Holden Karau

Hope to see you there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Googlers on the road: Linux.conf.au 2018

It’s summer in Sydney and Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2018 is just a week away. LCA, an annual event that attracts people from all over the globe, including Googlers, runs January 22nd to 26th.

LCA is a cornerstone of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. It’s volunteer-run, administered by Linux Australia, and has been running since 1999. Despite its name, the conference program covers all things FOSS. The event is five days long and includes two days of miniconfs that make the program even more interesting.

The Google Open Source team is escaping “wintery” Northern California and will be hosting a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session and co-hosting an event with GDG Sydney, both focused on our student programs.

A few Googlers ended up with sessions in the program and one is running a miniconf:

Tuesday, January 23rd
All day     Create hardware with FPGAs, Linux and Python Miniconf hosted by Tim Ansell (sold out)
11:40am  Learn by Contributing to Open Source by Josh Simmons
5:15pm    Assembling a balsa-wood Raspberry Pi case by Josh Deprez
5:45pm    Streaming Machine Learning with Apache Spark Meetup by Holden Karau

Wednesday, January 24th
1:40pm    Dealing with Contributor Overload by Holden Karau
3:50pm    Securing the Linux boot process by Matthew Garrett

Thursday, January 25th
12:25pm  Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in Birds of a Feather session
6:00pm    Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in Meetup with GDG Sydney

Friday, January 26th
11:40am  The State of Kernel Self-Protection by Kees Cook
1:40pm    QUIC: Replacing TCP for the Web by Jana Iyengar
2:35pm    The Web Is Dead! Long Live The Web! by Sam Thorogood

Not able to make the conference? They’ll be posting session recordings to YouTube afterwards, thanks in part to students who have worked on TimVideos, a suite of open source software and hardware for recording video, as part of Google Summer of Code.

Naturally, you will also find the Google Open Source team at other upcoming events including FOSDEM. We look forward to seeing you in 2018!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Talk to Google at Node.js Interactive

We’re headed to Vancouver this week, with about 25 Googlers who are incredibly excited to attend Node.js Interactive. With a mix of folks working on Cloud, Chrome, and V8, we’re going to be giving demos and answering questions at the Google booth.

A few of us are also going to be giving talks. Here’s a list of the talks Googlers will be giving at the conference, ranging from serverless Slack bots to JavaScript performance tuning.

Wednesday, October 4th

Keynote: Franzi Hinkelmann
9:40am - 10:00am, West Ballroom A
Franzi Hinkelmann, Software Engineer @ Google

Franzi is located in Munich, Germany where she works at Google on Chrome V8. Franzi, like James and Anna, is a member of the Node.js Core Technical Committee. She speaks across the globe on the topic of JavaScript virtual machines. She has a PhD in mathematics, but left academia to follow her true passion: writing code.

Franzi will discuss her perspective on Chrome V8 in Node.js, and what the Chrome V8 team is doing to continue to support Node.js. Want to know what the future of browser development looks like? This is a must-attend keynote.

Functionality Abuse: The Forgotten Class of Attacks
12:20pm - 12:50pm, West Ballroom A
Nwokedi Idika, Software Engineer @ Google

If you were given a magic wand that would remove all implementation flaws from your web application, would it be free of security problems? If it took you more five seconds to say “No!” (or if, worse, you said “Yes!”), then you’re the target audience for this talk. If you’re in the target audience, don’t fret, much of the security community is there with you. After this talk, attendees will understand why the answer to the aforementioned question is an emphatic “No!” and they will learn an approach to decrease their chance of failing to consider an important vector of attack for their current and future web applications.

High Performance JS in V8
5:20pm - 5:50pm, West Ballroom A
Peter Marshall, Software Engineer @ Google

This year, V8 launched Ignition and Turbofan, the new compiler pipeline that handles all JavaScript code generation. Previously, achieving high performance in Node.js meant catering to the oddities of our now-deprecated Crankshaft compiler. This talk covers our new code generation architecture - what makes it special, a bit about how it works, and how to write high performance code for the new V8 pipeline.

Thursday, October 5th

New DevTools Features for JavaScript
11:40am - 12:10pm, West Meeting Room 122
Yang Guo, Software Engineer @ Google

Ever since v8-inspector was moved to V8's repository, we have been working on a number of new features for DevTools, usable for both Chrome and Node.js. The talk will demonstrate code coverage, type profiling, and give a deep dive into how evaluating a code snippet in DevTools console works in V8.

Understanding and Debugging Memory Leaks in Your Node.js Applications
12:20pm - 12:50pm, West Meeting Room 122
Ali Sheikh, Software Engineer @ Google

Memory leaks are hard. This talk with introduce developers to what memory leaks are, how they can exist in a garbage collected language, the available tooling that can help them understand and isolate memory leaks in their code. Specifically it will talk about heap snapshots, the new sampling heap profiler in V8, and other various other tools available in the ecosystem.

Workshop: Serverless Bots with Node.js
2:20pm - 4:10pm, West Meeting Room 117
Bret McGowen, Developer Advocate @ Google
Amir Shevat, DevRel @ Slack

This talk will show you how to build both voice and chat bots using serverless technologies. Amir Shevat, Head of Developer Relations at Slack, has overseen 17K+ bots deployed on the platform. He will present a maturing model, as best practices, for enterprise bots covering all sorts of use cases ranging for devops, HR, and marketing. Alan Ho from Google Cloud will then show you how to use various serverless technologies to build these bots. He’ll give you a demo of Slack and Google Assistant bots incorporating Google’s latest serverless technology including Edge (API Management), CloudFunctions (Serverless Compute), Cloud Datastore, and API.ai.

Modules Modules Modules
3:00pm - 3:30pm, West Meeting Room 120
Myles Borins, Developer Advocate @ Google

ES Modules and Common JS go together like old bay seasoning and vanilla ice cream. This talk will dig into the inconsistencies of the two patterns, and how the Node.js project is dealing with reconciling the problem. The talk will look at the history of modules in the JavaScript ecosystem and the subtle difference between them. It will also skim over how ECMA-262 is standardized by the TC39, and how ES Modules were developed.

Keynote: The case for Node.js
4:50pm - 5:05pm, West Ballroom A
Justin Beckwith, Product Manager @ Google

Node.js has had a transformational effect on the way we build software. However, convincing your organization to take a bet on Node.js can be difficult. My personal journey with Node.js has included convincing a few teams to take a bet on this technology, and this community. Let’s take a look at the case for Node.js we made at Google, and how you can make the case to bring it to your organization.


We can’t wait to see everyone and have some great conversations. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter @googlecloud, or request an invite to the Google Cloud Slack community and join the #nodejs channel.

By Justin Beckwith, Languages and Runtimes Team

Open Source at Google I/O 2017

One of the best parts of Google I/O every year is the chance to meet with the developers and community organizers from all over the world. It's a unique opportunity to have candid one-on-one conversations about the products and technologies we all love.

This year, I/O features a Community Lounge for attendees to relax, hangout, and play with neat experiments and games. It also features several mini-meetups during which you can chat with Googlers on a variety of topics.

Chris DiBona and Will Norris from the Google Open Source Programs Office will be around Thursday and Friday to talk about anything and everything open source, including our student outreach programs and the new Google Open Source website. If you're at Google I/O this year, make sure to drop by and say hello. Find dates, times, and other details in the Community Lounge schedule.

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Saddle up and meet us in Texas for OSCON 2017

The Google Open Source team is getting ready to hit the road and join the open source panoply that is Open Source Convention (OSCON). This year the event runs May 8-11 in Austin, Texas and is preceded on May 6-7 by the free-to-attend Community Leadership Summit (CLS).

Program chairs at OSCON 2016, left to right:
Kelsey Hightower, Scott Hanselman, Rachel Roumeliotis.
Photo used with permission from O'Reilly Media.

You’ll find our team and many other Googlers throughout the week on the program schedule and in the expo hall at booth #401. We’ve got a full rundown of our schedule below, but you can swing by the expo hall anytime to discuss Google Cloud Platform, our open source outreach programs, the projects we’ve open-sourced including Kubernetes, TensorFlow, gRPC, and even our recently released open source documentation.

Of course, you’ll also find our very own Kelsey Hightower everywhere since he is serving as one of three OSCON program chairs for the second year in a row.

Are you a student, educator, project maintainer, community leader, past or present participant in Google Summer of Code or Google Code-in? Join us for lunch at the Google Summer of Code table in the conference lunch area on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll discuss our outreach programs which help open source communities grow while providing students with real world software development experience. We’ll be updating this blog post and tweeting with details closer to the date.

Without further ado, here’s our schedule of events:

Monday, May 8th (Tutorials)

9:00am   Site reliability engineering by Jean Joswig

1:30pm   Kubernetes hands-on by Kelsey Hightower

Tuesday, May 9th (Tutorials)

1:30pm   Building amazing cross-platform command-line apps in Go by Steve Francia co-presented with Ashley McNamara
1:30pm  "Measure all the things" and other memes you haven’t implemented yet by Kelsey Hightower

Wednesday, May 10th (Sessions)

11:00am  TensorFlow Community Keynote by Yufeng Guo and Amy Unruh

11:50am  The life of a large-scale open source project by Jessica Frazelle 

11:50am  What is machine learning by Amy Unruh

12:30pm Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in lunch

4:15pm   From WebSockets to WISH (web in strict HTTP) by Wenbo Zhu

5:05pm   gRPC 101 for Java developers: Building small and efficient microservices by Ray Tsang

5:05pm   Go deep, go wide, go everywhere: Hands-on machine learning with TensorFlow by Yufeng Guo

Thursday, May 11th (Sessions)

9:30am  Half my life spent in open source by Brad Fitzpatrick

4:15pm  Multilayered testing by Alex Martelli

We look forward to seeing you deep in the heart of Texas at OSCON 2017!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

By maintainers, for maintainers: Wontfix_Cabal

The Google Open Source Programs Office likes to highlight events we support, organize, or speak at. In this case, Google’s own Jess Frazelle was responsible for running a unique event for open source maintainers.

This year I helped organize the first inaugural Wontfix_Cabal. The conference was organized by open source software maintainers for open source software maintainers. Our initial concept was an unconference where attendees could discuss topics candidly with their peers from other open source communities.

The idea for the event stemmed from the response to a blog post I published about closing pull requests. The response was overwhelming, with many maintainers commiserating and sharing lessons they had learned. It seemed like we could all learn a lot from our peers in other projects -- if we had the space to do so -- and it was clear that people needed a place to vent.

Major thanks to Katrina Owen and Brandon Keepers from GitHub who jumped right in and provided the venue we needed to make this happen. Without their support this would’ve never become a reality!

It was an excellent first event and the topics discussed were wide ranging, including:

• How to deal with unmaintained projects
• Collecting metrics to judge project health
• Helping newcomers
• Dealing with backlogs
• Coping with, and minimizing, toxic behavior in our communities

Never have I seen so many open source maintainers in one place. Thanks @wontfix_, this is amazing pic.twitter.com/GdYXUjZds3

— Gregor (@gr2m) February 15, 2017

The discussion around helping newcomers focused on creating communities with welcoming and productive cultures right from the start. I was fascinated to learn that some projects pre-fill issues before going public so as to set the tone for the future of the project. Another good practice is clearly defining how one becomes a maintainer or gets commit access. There should be clear rules in place so people know what they have to do to succeed.

Another discussion I really liked focused on “saying no.” Close fast and close early was a key takeaway. There’s no sense in letting a contribution sit waiting when you know it will never be accepted. Multiple projects found that having a bot give the hard news was always better than having the maintainer do it. This way it is not personal, just a regular part of the process.

One theme seen in multiple sessions: “Being kind is not the same as being nice.” The distinction here is that being nice comes from a place of fear and leads people to bend over backwards just to please. Being kind comes from a place of strength, from doing the right thing.

Summaries of many of the discussions have been added to the GitHub repo if you would like to read more.

After the event concluded many maintainers got right to work, putting what they had learned into practice. For instance, Rust got help from the Google open source fuzzing team.

Flurry of internal emails following up on ideas from @wontfix_: all sent! Now it's time to start on some PRs.

— Rainer Sigwald (@Tashkant) February 22, 2017

Our goal was to put together a community of maintainers that could support and learn from each other. When I saw Linux kernel maintainers talking to people who work on Node and JavaScript, I knew we had achieved that goal. Laura Abbott, one of those kernel developers, wrote a blog post about the experience.

Not only was the event useful, it was also a lot of fun. Meeting maintainers, people who care a great deal about open source software, from such a diverse group of projects was great. Overall, I think our initial run was a success! Follow us on Twitter to find out about future events.

By Jess Frazelle, Software Engineer

Googlers on the road: FOSDEM 2017

The new year is off to an excellent start as we wrap up the 7th year of Google Code-in, ramp up for the 13th year of Google Summer of Code, and return from connecting with our compatriots in the open source community down under at Linux.conf.au. Next up? We’re headed to FOSDEM, Europe’s famed non-commercial and volunteer-organized open source conference.

FOSDEM logo licensed under CC BY.

FOSDEM is hosted in Brussels on the Université libre de Bruxelles campus and runs the weekend of February 4-5. It’s a unique event in the spirit of the free and open source software and is free to the public. This year they are expecting 8,000+ attendees.

We’re looking forward to talking face-to-face with some of the thousands of former students, mentors and organization administrators who have participated in our student programs. A few of them will even be giving talks about their recent Google Summer of Code experience.

If you’d like to say hello or chat about our programs, you’ll be sure to find a Googler or two at our table. You’ll also find a number of Googlers in the program schedule:

Saturday, February 4th

2:00pm    Bazel: How to build at Google scale by Klaus Aehlig
3:25pm    Copyleft in Commerce: How GPLv3 keeps Samba relevant in the marketplace by Jeremy Allison

Sunday, February 5th

10:40am  gRPC 101: Building fast and efficient microservices by Ray Tsang
10:50am  Is the GPL a copyright license or a contract under U.S. law? by Max Sills
12:45pm  The state of Go: What to expect in Go 1.8 by Francesc Campoy
1:00pm    Analyze terabytes of OS code with one query by Felipe Hoffa (more info)
2:50pm    Like the ants: Turn individuals into a large contributing community by Dan Franc

See you there!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Open source down under: Linux.conf.au 2017

It’s a new year and open source enthusiasts from around the globe are preparing to gather at the edge of the world for Linux.conf.au 2017. Among those preparing are Googlers, including some of us from the Open Source Programs Office.

This year Linux.conf.au is returning to Hobart, the riverside capital of Tasmania, home of Australia’s famous Tasmanian devils, running five days between January 16 and 20.

Tuz, a Tasmanian devil sporting a penguin beak, is the Linux.conf.au mascot.
(Artwork by Tania Walker licensed under CC BY-SA.)

The conference, which began in 1999 and is community organized, is well equipped to explore the theme, "the Future of Open Source," which is reflected in the program schedule and miniconfs.

You’ll find Googlers speaking (listed below) as well as participating in the hallway track. Don’t miss our Birds of a Feather session if you’re a student, educator, project maintainer, or otherwise interested in talking about outreach and student programs like Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

Monday, January 16th
12:20pm The Sound of Silencing by Julien Goodwin
1:20pm   An Open Programming Environment Inspired by Programming Games by Josh Deprez

Tuesday, January 17th
All day    Community Leadership Summit X at LCA

Wednesday, January 18th
2:15pm   Community Building Beyond the Black Stump by Josh Simmons

Thursday, January 19th
4:35pm   Using Python for creating hardware to record FOSS conferences! by Tim Ansell

Friday, January 20th
1:20pm   Linux meets Kubernetes by Vishnu Kannan

Not able to make it to the conference? Keynotes and sessions will be livestreamed, and you can always find the session recordings online after the event.

We’ll see you there!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Lessons from Professors' Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) 2016

From Google Summer of Code to Google Code-in, the Open Source Programs Office does a lot to get students involved with open source. In order to learn more about supporting open source in academia, I attended the NSF funded Professors' Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) in Philadelphia. It was a great opportunity for us to better understand the challenges instructors face in weaving open source into their curriculum and hear solutions on how to bridge the gap.

Almost 30 university professors and community college lecturers attended the 3-day workshop. During the workshop, attendees worked in small groups getting hands on experience incorporating humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) into their teaching. Professors were able to talk, mingle and share best practices throughout the event.

The POSSE workshop is led by Heidi Ellis, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at Western New England University, and Greg Hislop, Professor of Software Engineering and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Drexel University. Heidi and Greg took over running POSSE five years after Red Hat began the program as an outreach effort to the higher education community. Red Hat continues as a collaborator in the effort. Around 40 university and community college professors participate in the program every year with over 100 individuals attending the workshop in the last four years.

Here are some of the challenges professors shared:

• Very little guidance on how to bring FOSS into the classroom. No standard curriculum / syllabus available to reference. 
• Time investment required to change the curriculum.
• Will not be rewarded for teaching FOSS courses.
• Will not get funds to travel for workshops/conferences unless it’s to present a paper at a conference.
• Many administrations aren’t aware that adding open source is beneficial for students since more and more companies use open source and expect their new hires to be familiar with it.

The next POSSE will be Nov 17-19. Faculty who are interested in attending POSSE, please click here to apply.

We also discussed a number of open source programs that are currently working to engage students with open source software development:

• Corporate
  • Google Summer of Code
  • Google Code-in
  • Red Hat Open Source in Education
  • Facebook Open Academy
• Academic
  • Rochester Institute of Technology: Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture Minor Program
  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Rensselaer Center for Open Source
  • Oregon State University: Open Source Lab
  • University of California at Santa Cruz: Center for Research on Open Source Software

Thanks to Heidi, Greg and the FOSS2Serve team for organizing POSSE 2016! We look forward to taking what we’ve learned and using it to better support FOSS education in academia.

By Feiran Helen Hu, Open Source Programs Office

Googlers on the road: OSCON 2016 in Austin

Developers and open source enthusiasts converge on Austin, Texas in just under two weeks for O’Reilly Media’s annual open source conference, OSCON, and the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) that precedes it. CLS runs May 14-15 at the Austin Convention Center followed by OSCON from May 16-19.

OSCON 2014 program chairs including Googler Sarah Novotny.
Photo licensed by O'Reilly Media under CC-BY-NC 2.0.

This year we have 10 Googlers hosting sessions covering topics including web development, machine learning, devops, astronomy and open source. A list of all of the talks hosted by Googlers alongside related events can be found below.

If you’re a student, educator, mentor, past or present participant in Google Summer of Code or Google Code-in, or just interested in learning more about the two programs, make sure to join us Monday evening for our Birds of a Feather session.

Have questions about Kubernetes, Google Summer of Code, open source at Google or just want to meet some Googlers? Stop by booth #307 in the Expo Hall.

Thursday, May 12th - GDG Austin

7:00pm   Google Developers Group Austin Meetup

Sunday, May 15th - Community Leadership Summit

10:00am  Occupational Hazard by Josh Simmons

Monday, May 16th

9:00am   Kubernetes: From scratch to production in 2 days by Brian Dorsey and Jeff Mendoza

7:00pm   Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in Birds of a Feather

Tuesday, May 17th

9:00am   Kubernetes: From scratch to production in 2 days by Brian Dorsey and Jeff Mendoza

9:00am   Diving into machine learning through TensorFlow by Julia Ferraioli, Amy Unruh and Eli Bixby

Wednesday, May 18th

1:50pm    Open source lessons from the TODO Group by Chris DiBona, Chris Aniszczyk, Nithya Ruff, Jeff McAffer and Benjamin VanEvery

5:10pm    Scalable bidirectional communication over the Web by Wenbo Zhu

Thursday, May 19th
11:00am  Kubernetes hackathon at OSCON Contribute hosted by Brian Dorsey, Nikhil Jindal, Janet Kuo, Jeff Mendoza, John Mulhausen, Sarah Novotny, Terrence Ryan and Chao Xu

2:40pm    Blocks in containers: Lessons learned from containerizing Minecraft by Julia Ferraioli

5:10pm    PANOPTES: Open source planet discovery by Jennifer Tong and Wilfred Gee

5:10pm    Stop writing JavaScript frameworks by Joseph Gregorio

Haven’t registered for OSCON yet? You can knock 25% off the cost of registration by using discount code Google25, or attend parts of the event including our Birds of a Feather session for free by using discount code OSCON16XPO.

See you at OSCON!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Impressions from the European Lisp Symposium, Goldsmith University April 2015

Martin Cracauer is a software engineer for Google’s Travel team and a dedicated Lisp enthusiast. Below, he shares his impressions of the recent European Lisp Symposium.

In April, I attended the 8th European Lisp Symposium in London. It was good to be there and I'm proud to have played a part by giving a talk about unwanted memory retention.

More than anything, I was struck by the professionalism of the performance-oriented Lisp programmers giving talks. The Lisp community has moved beyond fighting with their compilers and settling for a couple useless microoptimizations. At a modern Lisp conference like this one, the same terms used at any other performance computing conference rain down upon the audience. There isn't a generic "probably didn't fit the cache" -- now we talk specific caches and line counts. We don't say "swapping" -- we give specific counts of major and minor page faults and recognize the relative cost of each. We have a deep awareness of what will end up being a system call, and which ones are cheap in which OS.  I had a lot of interest at the 2006 European Common Lisp Meeting by describing how ITA uses Lisp only at compile time and gets full performance at runtime. In 2015, that’s just normal.

There’s still work to do, however. It’s not there yet, but I think Lisp should become the ideal language for both SIMD computing (via new primitives allowing the programmer to tell the compiler instead of relying on arbitrarily smart compilers) and for speculative execution (allow the programmer to make promises and crash if they turn out untrue). I'm always hoping somebody (else) will kick off that effort.

The second thing that struck me was how much people at this conference leverage two of Lisp’s major advantages:

• compile time computing (having the full runtime language at compile time to expand your compiled code from whatever abstraction is most suitable)
• and the "commandline", the REPL, inside a high performance language

Several presenters combined those features to construct 3D objects, and even built a bridge between computed 3D objects and interactively built objects (in a graphical editor). One of those sessions was Dave Cooper’s tutorial. Both could create sets of 3D objects that mixed computed objects and interactive building at an astonishing rate.

Breanndán Ó Nualláin’s talk, "Executable Pseudocode for Graph Algorithms", was useful to me because it gave a digestible example of more complex compile time computing. It’s difficult to illustrate the concept, but Breanndán used Lisp’s power as a "programmable programming language" to make a frontend that expresses pseudocode for algorithms in an optimized s-expression syntax. The result is readable, executable, and fast. In addition, you can easily create a backend that targets LaTeX so that you could put your running algorithm in a textbook. This is so useful when trying to understand what the power of a "programmable programming language" really means. Now your LaTex for the algorithms paper is derived from proven working code.

To me, the most jaw-dropping talk of the conference was Christian E. Schafmeister’s "Clasp - A Common Lisp that Interoperates with C++ and Uses the LLVM Backend". The title is the understatement of the year. What is going on here is building tiny 3-nanometer protein-like structures to do useful things like cure cancer and destroy sarin. Although many C++ libraries exist for building such structures, it would be too painful to glue them all together in C++. Instead of feeding C++ through a layer of C and back into some object representation (like the rest of us, cough) Christian presented a Common Lisp implementation running in LLVM, using the LLVM runtime libraries that provide introspection to directly interface to C++. He was kind enough to give the talk again at our Google Cambridge office where it was recorded.

At large scale, Lisp exposes some rough spots. A lot of Googlers like really clean modularization, but Common Lisp packages don't quite provide it. This used to be a big problem for CMUCL, reducing the number of people who could build it. Robert Strandh talked about “First-class Global Environments in Common Lisp”. I am sure people would love to see that in SBCL. I also liked Paul van der Walt's talk, bringing forward ideas to improve restricted runtime environments (such as mobile devices) while keeping them easy to describe in their dependencies.

In my own talk on “Unwanted Memory Retention”, I didn’t just limit the discussion to Lisp, SBCL, and its garbage collector. I addressed group culture and perception bias: how imbalanced performance tradeoffs come about in long-running software projects, how they mix with rapid changes in the computing environment around your Lisp, and how Lisp is just a bit more flexible dealing with them.

This conference was an enlightening experience and I hope slides and videos will become available. For now, many of the topics covered are also discussed in the Symposium’s peer-reviewed papers (16MB PDF). But honestly, just reading doesn't do justice to the conference. People there were great presenters, too, and attending it was inspirational.

by Martin Cracauer, Travel team

2015-06-24 Edited to clarify the subject of Martin's 2006 talk.