GDG Wellington

DevFest 2026 with GDG Wellington

Thu, Nov 19 · 5:30 PM NZDT

Trade Me, 2 Market Lane, Wellington, NZ

** Meetup will say 0 spots available, RSVP via the GDG platform here: https://w.gdg.nz/devfest **

Join us for Wellington's biggest DevFest yet! We're excited to bring you an evening jam-packed with all the new goodies from the last year.

This year we are bringing you two 30-minute talks followed by a 15-minute lightning talk, and of course providing Q&A time with our speakers. We'll also have some kai (food) and inu (drink).

The talks are being finalised, we will update this page when we can confirm the speakers.

Schedule (subject to change):

5.30 - Doors open

6.00 - 30-minute talk (AI, Meet App with Katie Barnett)

6.30 - Q&A for the first talk

6.40 - 15-minute lightning talk

6.55 - Q&A for the lightning talk

7.00 - 30-minute talk #2

7.30 - Q&A for the second talk

7.40 - Food and Networking

8.30 - Event ends

About "AI, Meet App: Teaching Android Apps to Talk to Gemini via App Functions"
Ever wished your Android app could just understand what your users actually want? Enter App Functions. In this session, we’ll explore how to bridge the gap between Android apps and Gemini. You’ll learn the core concepts of App Functions, see how they expose app capabilities to Google’s GenAI ecosystem, and discover how to get Gemini to trigger specific actions within your app seamlessly.

About "Agents in Your Pocket: Building the Autohive Mobile App with Kotlin Multiplatform and a Little Help from AI"
Autohive gives you a no-code agentic platform with agents that take over the jobs that keep coming back, and then ask for your OK before doing anything that is critical. That approval has to reach you wherever you are, which was the initial reason to build a mobile app.

It didn't stay that small. Today the app does far more than approve things, and every new feature tested the decisions we made when the scope was a set of approval buttons. Why did we bet on one shared Kotlin codebase, UI included, instead of two native apps? Which choices held up as the app grew, and which would we make differently now? Where did "write it once" hold, and where did we go native anyway?

I'll also show how we use AI to build the app, and the guardrails that stop it from becoming a liability.

You'll leave with a clearer view of how early tech choices age as a product grows, and what AI-assisted mobile engineering looks like day to day.

Agenda

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Speakers

Katie Barnett - Google Developer Expert for Android (搜索 Engineering Manager at Bilue | Google Developer Expert (Android)​)

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 one of the organisers of GDG Melbourne and is a Women Techmakers Ambassador. Sh…

Kai Koenig - Autohive

Kai Koenig is part of the Autohive team in Wellington, where he has been working on Autohive's mobile app since the early days of the product. Autohive is an AI startup spun out of Raygun. Kai designed the app's Kotlin Multiplatform architecture and API layer, built the Python SDK for Autohive's external agent integrations, and works with AI coding agents every day. He joined in 2025. Kai has …

Hosted By

Liam Edwards, Organizer

Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-wellington-presents-devfest-2026-with-gdg-wellington/.