Darren "Dazbo" Lester
Cloud architect, leader, Google Cloud & AI evangelist, and technology blogger. Known to the community as Dazbo.
London, United Kingdom
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I've worn many hats over my IT career, including developer, tech lead, people manager, infrastructure architect, enterprise architect and cloud architect. Regardless of the role, I discovered that the best way to master a complex topic is to write it down. And then I had this thought: "What if I still wrote everything down, but I invite everyone else to learn from it?" Today, I'm an active blogger, speaker and Google Developer Expert (GDE), focussing on AI, Google Cloud, architecture and strategy. I don't just want to talk about the "what" of these technologies; I want to help you understand the "why" and the "how".
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Automating the UI with Google Antigravity, MCP and Skills
In this workshop we get hands-on with Antigravity, MCP and agent skills.
We start with a demo of Antigravity CLI, showing how we can combine features like Google Search, shell execution and MCP servers to perform sophisticated tasks. We cover configuration, including model selection and the policy engine.
You will learn how to automate interactions with a web application in the browser, using natural language prompting. There are many possibilities for what we can do with this, and in this session we will experiment with automated UI testing.
We will run through a dedicated Google codelab, step-by-step. We start with MCP-based remote control, and then move on to using Agent Skills. You will learn what agent skills are, and the scenarios where we can combine them with MCP or a CLI. We cover the advantages of Agent Skills, including just-in-time power-ups through progressive discovery. Think: Neo learning kung-fu!
Powering-up Antigravity with MCP and Skills
Antigravity is awesome, but so much more powerful, accurate and reliable when we pair it up with MCP servers and skills.
In this session I can cover any and all of these topics:
- Intro to the Antigravity ecosystem
- Using Antigravity CLI / Antigravity IDE / Antigravity 2.0
- Why MCP? Why skills?
- How to configure them in Agy
- My favourite MCP servers and skills and the use cases they are great for.
How to Build a FinOps Solution with Antigravity
In this talk I'll walk you through the end-to-end journey of building a multi-agent FinOps solution, using ADK, Antigravity, skills, and MCP servers.
Agenda:
- The FinOps use case - but this is just to have a goal. The approach is for any use case.
- Some key upfront design decisions - like using ADK, selecting MCPs, agent hosting, and UI
- Setting up your Antigravity environment.
- Demo: using Agy "grill-me" to scaffold your overall project.
- Creating a good GEMINI.md (or AGENTS.md) to help Agy co-development with you.
- Picking some skills to speed up our development.
- Demo: using BigQuery Managed MCP in Antigravity
- Scaffolding your ADK agents using the Google Agents CLI and the Agents CLI skills.
- Testing with ADK Web
- Deploying to Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Agent Runtime
Setting Hard Caps to Limit Your Google Cloud Spend
For years, Google Cloud budget alerts were purely informational. They sent an email while your project quietly burned through your savings. But recently, Google has introduced native Cloud Spend Caps (currently in Public Preview). You can now hard-cap spend per service so an unexpected API leak or runaway script hits a 403 Permission Denied wall instead of creating a $10,000 bill.
Here I'll demonstrate how to configure it and protect your own projects from runaway spend.
Build with AI Prishtina: From Ideas to Impact
Build with AI Prishtina is a 2-day hybrid hackathon where developers, students, and AI enthusiasts come together to learn, build, and share AI projects. Join online on May 14 and in person at Gjirafa on May 16 for workshops, teamwork, and a final demo session with prizes.
Here I present the masterclass: “Automating the UI with Gemini CLI, MCP, and Skills”.
Google Cloud Next '26
Google's largest annual flagship event, held over multiple days in Las Vegas. Over 30000 people in attendance to hear the latest Google Cloud & AI announcements, roadmap, and info.
I'm presenting a live talk at the heart of the Conference in the Lightning Theatre.
Google Cloud Next '25
Google's largest annual flagship event, held over multiple days in Las Vegas. Over 30000 people in attendance to hear the latest Google Cloud & AI announcements, roadmap, and info.
I'm representing EPAM and co-presenting with Deutsche Bank's Head of Cloud Architecture, describing how we massively accelerated cloud migration across the organisation.
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