Takeaways From Google IO

This last week, I was lucky enough to attend the Google IO Conference in San Francisco and meet many of the people who make Google Summer of Code possible.

Since Melange runs on Google App Engine, we spent a good portion of the conference attending App Engine talks given by Brett Slatkin, Ryan Barrett, and others. Here are a few of the key takeaways from those talks:

• When you are establishing many-to-many relationships using a db.ListProperty, separate these properties to their own model to optimize your index sizes.



• App Engine currently has 200,000 developers, and 80,000 apps. We can expect these numbers to continue growing, especially since GAE will likely be the favored environment for Wave development.



• We can expect to see a sandboxed version of new App Engine features deployed via "App Engine Labs". This appears to be consistent with Google's other products, where we've already seen useful new features deployed when they might not be ready (or necessary) for core integration.



• The Task Queue API will be available for developers very, very soon. (I'm very eager to get my hands on it, since I'll eventually need it for my GSOC project)

It was a pleasure to meet the Melange mentors outside of IRC, for once. I got a chance to learn a little more about their own background and experience as GSOC students.


And the biggest win was photographing ourselves standing next to a giant Cupcake. That alone has gotten #io2010 already added to my calendar.