Jump to the tl;dr below for just the updates and links.

This week on The Developer Show, join us for an “award worthy” behind-the-scenes chat with Laurence Moroney on the set of Coffee with a Googler. Find out about which guests Laurence is hoping to one day get some coffee with, and share your own suggestions with him too!

tl;dr

Just the updates and links

Web

• Go beyond just JavaScript APIs, frameworks, and the mysteries of CSS to also learn the tooling that can mean the difference between an average web developer and a super-productive web developer. Check out recently launched Web Tooling & Automation course on Udacity to learn about setting up your editor, creating powerful build scripts, live editing, linting and all other sorts of awesome optimizations
• It’s now a lot easier to retrieve data about an authenticated user’s connections from their Contacts by using the new People API.
• It’s time to update to HTTP/2 as Chrome will no longer support SPDY starting on May 15th which is the anniversary of the HTTP/2 RFC.
• Starting in version 49, Chrome for Android will surface Physical Web content, helping an even larger audience discover URLs relevant to their surroundings via Eddystone bluetooth low-energy beacons. Which makes now a great time to check out what the Physical Web can do for your users.

Android & iOS

• Use Google to rapidly build backend services for your mobile app that scale automatically to meet demand, automatically synchronize data across devices, handle the offline case gracefully, and send notifications and messages.
• Learn how Hydro Coach rapidly reached 22 new markets in this new blog post on monetization tips straight from successful app developers. It’s a great companion to the The No-nonsense Guide to App Monetization we recently mentioned on this show.
• Make more money from your app with in app payments. This video on the Zen of monetization with Ido Green shows you how.
• Need an awesome functional UI testing framework for iOS? Well, we just open sourced the one we use for YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Translate, and Google Play Music. Check out the blog post for more details and the GitHub link.

Open Source

• The Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with a mentor open source organization on a three month programming project during their break from university. If you’d like to be a mentor organization, follow the link and submit an application.

IoT

• If you’re a university researcher working on the Internet of Things, we invite you to participate in this Technology Research Award Pilot. It provides selected researchers with in-kind gifts of Google IoT related technologies, with the goal of fostering collaboration on small-scale experiments and discovering what you can do with our software and devices. As usual, the blog post has a lot more detail.

Jump to the tl;dr below for just the updates and links.

This week on The Developer Show, I sneak backstage for a behind-the-scenes chat with Chet Haase and Tor Norbye at the “Android Developers Backstage” podcast studio.

Have a question? Use #AskDevShow to let us know!

tl;dr

Just the updates and links

Project Tango

Project Tango is hosting workshops to help bring indoor location apps to life. You may remember our visit to one of these workshops a couple episodes ago — it was really cool. Follow this link to read more and submit your own idea.

Google Cloud Platform

To help your business grow, we are significantly increasing the size limits of all Google Compute Engine block storage products, including up to 3TB of Local SSD and 64TB of persistent disk per virtual machine. Check out the post for more details.

If you enjoy debating the merits of the Spark and Dataflow programming models, you get excited at the idea of processing terabytes in seconds with zero setup, or simply want to learn how to use the infrastructure that powers Google for your data processing work; this new blog on big data is for you.

Web

Dart 1.14 is now available and contains a number of additions and improvements across our core libraries and tools including progress towards eliminating symbolic links and a new way to access package assets easily and reliably.

The newest Chrome Beta release includes CSS custom properties, background sync with service workers, and new ECMAScript 2015 features. Check out the blog post, and the beta.

Over the last couple weeks we’ve published a bunch of new articles on our web updates page. Check out all the great new content including information on ecma-script proxies, controlling font performance, and more.

AdMob

Invalid activity consists of any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser’s costs or a publisher’s earnings. Learn how you can avoid invalid activity with these quick tips.

Marvin Minsky

“Intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents.”

This and other big ideas came from the work of Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence and winner of the Turing Award in nineteen sixty nine. He recently died at the age of 88. For more on Minsky’s work, check out this great article by the New York Times.

Women Techmakers

Women Techmakers is Google’s global program for women in tech and is hosting 14 summits at Google offices and 100 meetups are expected with Google Developer Groups globally to celebrate International Women’s Day in March and April. Apply to attend — they’re gonna be awesome.