

So Today the 8th of December, I was invited to the first day of g|egypt days. It was for academics and students. It was in a beautiful hotel/resort called Dust Thani in new cairo. The atmosphere was lovely and some familiar faces and other excited ones. Everyone was here to see googlers , talk with them and see what they can offer. With high hopes the sessions began.

A keynote from the VP of product and engineering in the region and europe Mr.Nelson Mattos. It was a show off more than anything, however I was impressed with some of the demo’s he and Sebastian (Industry Relation Lead in the region) both showed us and tested live for the audience. They had noticeably strong loyalty to google, every googler in the event did. The presentations were nice and useful, like knowing some of the new apps like the Google conversation using translate and google voice commands. An instant translator to help you talk with people who don’t speak your language and vice versa (I’ve seen it before tho).

Now we had to make a choice, App Engine or Chrome extensions , those are two different google technology that we were supposed to get our hands dirty with and get our applications into a competition to see which is the best. So I choose Chrome extensions, oh boy did I regret that. The Session was a pure disaster, the guy was more than 30 minutes late and when he came, he started copy pasting code without even explaining. After a very horrible session, I decided to join my friends Mohammed Ashry and Essam Abdel-hady in the Google App Engine. Essam and Ashry came up with the idea of having a job market as our entry in the competition.

We started coding, I handled the design end (Html and CSS) Essam and Ashry handled the Code (Python). We missed 2 or 3 sessions to get the code done. We attended one of the last or maybe the last presentation given by our own Noha Salem ( ex TA in GUC ) it was about opportunities Google Gives to Students. Those are a lot, Internships , internships for women only, Google Summer of Code, Code Jam and I think it’s a bigger list.

After this nice session, it was judgement day, we’ve deployed our application online and we are ready to give a one minute demo. We were very excited, imagine presenting to more than 200 mostly engineers or teachers or doctors add to them Googlers. We were the second team up , Essam took the demo actions and I took the Presenting. Here we go. after about few minutes all we hear is applause and we were off the stage.

About 10 or 15 minutes later, the results are being announced, we were almost sure we gonna win this, by many reviews and feedback we were the best App, but that wasn’t the opinion of most of the judges. So the last presentation wins a HTC desire phone. Hate the guy much !? nah , only a little.

After all, It was a great day, I’ve met some new guys , I’ve worked with an AMAZING team and we went back home with GOOGLE t-shirts and mugs. But what I really went home with was inspiration, excitement and encouragement to be better, to be an awesome engineer like the googelers I’ve met today. I’ve always wanted to go work for google , but now it’s no longer a wish it’s a Goal.

That’s it guys,

those are the live search results for the Google days #gday and #gegypt on twitter.

And this is the quick presentation I wanted to present, but didn’t get the chance to.

Here are some pics of the Event.

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