GDG Melbourne February 2026 Meetup!

RSVP on our Meetup event >> https://www.meetup.com/gdg-melbourne/events/313164035/

RSVP Codeword: NEWYEAR

Get ready for our first monthly meetup of the year!

This event is hosted at the Mantel Group Office, with the recording of the talks to be shared afterwards on YouTube if you can't make it.

There will be food, networking and some surprise swag!

Agenda:

6:20 - Intro

6:30 - Talks

8:00 till late - networking & chat (& drinks optional)

Talks and Speakers:

Kotlin → C#; Experimenting with Cross-Runtime Interop by Isuru Rajapakse, Senior Android Developer at Motorola Solutions
Kotlin is a warm, cozy blanket of null safety and garbage collection so that we don't gave to get our feet wet. But what happens when you rip that blanket away, compile your Kotlin code down to a C static library, and try to use it in a .NET application? I did it so you don't have to. And I brought the stack traces to prove it.

From Hype to Hands-On: Building Smarter Apps with the Agent Development Kit by Lovee Jain, Google Developer Expert - Cloud | Senior Software Engineer @Prezzee

AI agents are more than hype — they’re a new way to design applications. In this talk, we’ll take a practical look at the Agent Development Kit (ADK) and how developers can use it to orchestrate multi-agent workflows. We’ll explore agent types, chaining strategies, and how to integrate tools and context effectively.
The session includes a demo of a point-based buying agent that showcases how agents can interact, make decisions, and deliver value in a real-world scenario. Expect less buzzword, more code, and practical lessons you can apply in your own projects.

Agentic DevOps: I Gave AI Agents root access to a VM – Here’s What I Learned by Bishal Sapkota, Software Engineer | AI Solutions Architect | Co-founder at Outback Yak

Real Automation, self patching, persistent memory, cron jobs, and the obvious loaded gun.

How to find us:

Doors open at 5:45 PM at our host the Mantel Group, Level 2/452 Flinders St Melbourne. Message via Meetup or Slack if you are arriving after 6:00 as the lifts won't let you up. 

This is an in-person only event. If you have any accessibility requirements please reach out via the Meetup or Slack to the organiser group to discuss and we will do our best to help you out.

Agenda

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Hosted By

Katie Barnett, GDE Android / GDG Organiser

Katie is passionate about all things Android. She has taken on a wide variety of challenging projects including in the live event, media and travel space. Her favourite thing is to see someone having a delightful experience using something she has worked on. Katie is very active in the development community, she is a Google Developer Expert for Android, one of the organisers of GDG Melbourne and is a Women Techmakers Ambassador. She frequently runs events, speaks on technical and non-technical topics and enjoys writing blog posts to share her experience with others. Katie is based in Melbourne, Australia but loves to travel the world and outside of tech she enjoys boardgaming and attempting to finish many craft projects.

Suesi Tran, Senior Flutter Developer

Google Developer Expert in Dart, Flutter & Firebase, Women Techmaker Melbourne ambassador, GDG Melbourne & Flutter Melbourne co-organiser.
In short: Flutter is love, and mobile is life.

Poornima Sivakumar, GDG Organiser

Lovee Jain, GDG Organiser

Lovee is a Software Engineer at Prezzee, a GDG Melbourne Organiser and also a Women Techmakers Ambassador. A tech inquisitive philomath, she loves problem solving and solution design. She has worked at a city council where she developed a lot of useful system integrations and while at Prezzee she develops and works on multiple gift card solutions to cater the B2B2C market.

Zach Jensz, GDG Organiser

Passionate about the web, seamless UX and accessibility. I love attending meetups, find me and come say hi!

Ujjawal Raj, GDG Organiser

Bramley Turner-Jones, GDG Organiser

Yuba Raj (UV) Panta, GDG Cloud Organiser

Kartik Arora, Android Engineer

Google Developer Expert in Android
Android Engineer @ Bilue

Carolyn Ai Chi Wong,

Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-melbourne-presents-gdg-melbourne-february-2026-meetup/.