Bret McGowen
Software Engineer, Developer Advocate, formerly Google NYC
New York City, New York, United States
Bret McGowen is a software engineer and former Developer Advocate on the Google Cloud team for serverless products like Cloud Run, Google Cloud Functions, App Engine, Firebase, machine learning APIs, and more. Prior to Google, Bret worked as a software engineer at Rackspace. He's often on the running trail, volleyball court or kickball field.
Bret is an avid runner, having run in 5 full marathons and 19 half marathons. He also loves travel, having visited 70+ countries and almost all 51 countries in Europe.
Bret lives in New York City and earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Texas A&M University.
Reach Bret McGowen on Twitter at @bretmcg.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Serverless is not magic: best practices for moving your apps to serverless
Serverless makes deploying your apps easier than ever, but it's not magic and there are many possible pitfalls along the way. Moving to microservices? Adding fault tolerance? Cold starts? What about downstream legacy dependencies? We'll dive into each of these topics and more by showing how to move an example application from a traditional app platform to serverless.
Six Serverless Building Blocks
Serverless is reaching buzzword status and there's now an explosion of "serverless" technologies out there: from Functions-as-a-Service to Backend-as-a-Service, Machine-Learning-as-a-Service and even Big Data-as-a-Service. Learn what these terms mean and how you can leverage these new technologies to build autoscaling apps in record time - all without managing servers or application runtimes. You'll see live coding and live demos of integrations between different serverless technologies (such as Firebase and Google Cloud Functions) with serverless machine learning thrown in for fun.
Ok, Google: live code a Google Assistant app
Live coding alert! Watch as I build a custom action for Google Assistant in just a few minutes. The Google Assistant is the conversational user interface for Android, iPhone, and Google Home devices that helps you get things done in your world.
Google Cloud hands-on workshop: build a serverless web store
Bring your laptop and come learn how to deploy a serverless web store using Google’s serverless stack! Whether you’re brand new to Google Cloud or a seasoned vet, you’ll learn about serverless compute tools such as Google Cloud Run for a web app and Cloud Functions for event-driven processing. Need a serverless database? We’ll hook the store up to Firestore, a NoSQL database that scales as you use it. CI/CD, alerting and monitoring and more!
Prerequisites
Please bring your laptop for the hands-on workshop.
Machine Learning and Big Data Magic with Node.js and Google Cloud
Want to build a Node.js app that detects landmarks in your photos, analyzes text sentiment, and translates text into 100+ languages? You could build your own machine learning models, but there’s still a lot of work involved and sometimes you just want an npm module that can tell you if your vacation photo has a dinosaur in it. It's not as easy as `npm install machine-learning`, but this is the next best thing.
With a bit of machine learning magic, you can access the same ML technology used in Google Photos, "Ok, Google", and Google Translate. In this talk, we’ll provide an overview of these APIs, show you how to use them in Node.js and risk it all with a live demo.
We'll end with a peek into the Node.js community by querying terabytes of data.
NDC Sydney 2017 Sessionize Event
NDC Sydney 2017
Machine Learning and Big Data Magic with Node.js and Google Cloud - Sara Robinson & Bret McGowen (58:33)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZXkoc223qk&ab_channel=NDCConferences
Want to build a Node.js app that detects landmarks in your photos, analyzes text sentiment, and translates text into 100+ languages? You could build your own machine learning models, but there’s still a lot of work involved and sometimes you just want an npm module that can tell you if your vacation photo has a dinosaur in it. It's not as easy as `npm install machine-learning`, but this is the next best thing.
With a bit of machine learning magic, you can access the same ML technology used in Google Photos, "Ok, Google", and Google Translate. In this talk, we’ll provide an overview of these APIs, show you how to use them in Node.js and risk it all with a live demo.
We'll end with a peek into the Node.js community by querying terabytes of data.
Node Summit 2017
Google Assistant is the conversational user interface for Android, iPhone, and Google Home devices that helps you get things done in your world. Actions on Google let you extend Assistant with your own application to interact with your users. Come learn how to build a custom Action and see how the same tools can help you build a serverless chatbot for Slack, Facebook Messenger, Google Home and more using Google Cloud Platform.
Watch the video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C492KgDMO0c or https://vimeo.com/229679959
Slides available at:
https://www.slideshare.net/bretmc/google-home-and-google-assistant-workshop-build-your-own-serverless-action-on-google-app
Check out my YouTube channel at:
https://www.youtube.com/c/BretMcG
Devoxx Belgium 2016
Supercharge your web app with the new Firebase by Bret McGowen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRyx8uDDFc
SpringOne Platform 2016
gRPC 101 for Spring Developers (co-presenter with Ray Tsang) (32:40)
Ray Tsang and Bret McGowen discuss using gRPC's streaming API to build sophisticated real-time applications, diving into integration with Maven, Gradle, Spring Boot and RxJava.
Google I/O 2016
Supercharging Firebase with Google Cloud Platform - (33:41)
In Supercharging Firebase with Google Cloud Platform developer advocates Sandeep Dinesh and Bret McGowen use Firebase to build a real-time game that interacts with virtual machines, big data and machine learning APIs on GCP. The coolest part of the demo involves the audience in the room and on the livestream interacting with the game via Speech API, all yelling instructions at the same time to move a dot through a maze. The hallmark of Firebase — real-time data synchronization across connected devices in milliseconds — is on display here and fun to see.
DevFest DC 2015
Overview of Google Cloud Platform. Video also available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IViUMN1PcTs
Montclair State University - Google Developers Group
"Google Cloud Spin" Ray Tsang & Bret McGowen (Google)
Ray and Bret will walk through features of the Google Cloud Platform used in building the Google Cloud Spin demo shown at recent #GCPNext events. The demo uses an orchestrated set of smartphones to capture multi-angle views of the same event, upload them to the cloud and have them stitched together in real time to create a single 180-degree snapshot of that moment.
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