Appsterdam Guru Session: Google App Engine for beginners

One of the things I was not expecting when I moved to Amsterdam was its active and vibrant tech community. Appsterdam, a non-profit organization focused around aggregating people with a passion for technology, is probably one of the central forces in this movement.

In my year in Amsterdam I had been to a few meetups organized by people from Appsterdam and always came back home having learned something new. This is why when my colleague Matt (who himself is quite an active Appsterdam member) talked me into presenting a guru session on Google App Engine, I saw that as an opportunity to return the favor.

While I tried to give an overview of App Engine in general (and the Python flavor, specifically), I also wanted to offer attendees the chance to work on some examples that were more interesting than the typical guestbook application that comes with all the tutorials you can find online.

The code examples build on two of the many APIs App Engine has to offer:

• the Channel API to build a web page that displays the current cursor position of every user looking at that site,
• Google Cloud Endpoints to implement a simple REST-like backend for a webpage.

You can check out the slide deck below and get the code examples from the GitHub repository.

App Engine is a lot more than an advanced infrastructure to deploy applications: the numerous APIs and services it offers can enable developers to build advanced applications with limited effort. I hope this presentation, while just scratching the surface, gives you a glimpse on the possibilities.

Special thanks to Matt for pushing me to do this and Serena for her help with example 2.