GDG Cloud Sydney Meetup Feburary 2025
Details
GDG Cloud Sydney is back for a meetup this Feburary! Join us for an evening of interesting technical talks.
Come Hire!
There are 10 minutes dedicated to the meetup for hirers to advertise their recruitment and for job seekers to promote themselves to those hirers.
This meetup is in the in-person format; there are no plans to stream the event*
Partners
This meetup is organised in partnership with Mantel Group. They harness technologies that transform business operations in the real world. With capabilities spanning Cloud, Data, Digital and Security, they merge emerging technologies with innovative design and industry expertise to enhance your business. With deep technical specialisation and as leading Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud partners, the depth and breadth our solutions offer is unparalleled. Mantel Group is your partner for end-to-end digital transformation.
Ranked in Australia's top 10 Best Workplaces by Great Place To Work Australia for four years in a row, we are people-focused and uphold strong values. Our culture champions trust, empowerment, and diversity, with a lean structure that emphasizes collaboration, direct communication and equity.
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"Dented Code teaches coding skills that you need to become a full stack developer and help you advance your career, pursue your dream job, or enjoy the freedom of life as a freelancer." - Learn more on their website.
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Programmable is the Australian software engineering conference. The event celebrates fantastic developer content coupled with a focus on human connection; bringing people together to create serendipitous interactions.
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We will also give out 2 licenses from JetBrains 1-year subscription to any of JetBrains' IDEs with a raffle. You can use the 100% discount code on CLion, DataGrip, DataSpell, GoLand, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, PhpStorm, PyCharm, ReSharper, ReSharper C++, Rider, RubyMine, WebStorm, or dotUltimate.
Talks
Talk 1: Visualising Big Data with Big Query and Google Looker Studio - Ranjana Dangol
In today’s data-driven world, visualizing large datasets effectively is crucial for informed decision-making. This presentation will explore how to leverage Google BigQuery, a scalable cloud-based data warehouse, in combination with Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio), a powerful visualization tool, to make Big Data insights accessible and actionable. Attendees will learn how to harness BigQuery’s fast, SQL-based querying capabilities and Looker Studio’s flexible, interactive dashboards to transform complex datasets into clear, insightful visualizations. The presentation will cover best practices for connecting, analysing, and visualising data, demonstrating how these modern tools simplify data workflows and enhance real-time decision-making.
About the speaker - Ranjana
I am Ranjana Dangol, a software engineer currently working at Service NSW. I have completed my Master’s degree in Information Technology in 2019 and have developed expertise in software engineering and data analytics.
Talk 2: Modernise web scraping: use a self-hosted LLM to extract data from (almost) any website - Geshan Manandhar
Web scraping is complex and brittle. When the scraped website's theme or structure changes, the scraper must adapt to those changes, making it troublesome. Learn how to write web scrapers that use AI to skip manual matching and get the desired data in the appropriate format.
In this session, you will learn to use an LLM (Google Gemma) hosted on Google Cloud Run. This makes the cost predictable and ensures that your data will not be sent to any third party. We will start with a regular (Python) Beautiful Soup web scraper. Then, it will be updated to use self-hosted Gemma 2 with LiteLLM to extract the talks and speakers from 5+ DevFests worldwide and show the scraped data. Come prepared to grasp a new way of web scraping to pluck desired data from (almost) any website.
About the speaker - Geshan
Geshan is a seasoned software engineer with over 17 years of software engineering experience. Currently, in Sydney, Australia, serving Simply Wall St. as a senior software engineer. He is a language-agnostic software engineer who believes the value provided to the business is more important than the choice of language or framework. With a keen interest in REST architecture, microservices, agile software engineering, and serverless, he has spoken at tech conferences in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and Australia. He is actively involved with the developer community and is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). He is a certified scrum master, too. Blogging since 2007, he has a well-maintained tech blog, where he shares his views and ideas.
MC: Nargis Rezaie
Event Schedule
5:30pm - Event doors open
6:00pm - Introduction and hiring connect for those hiring/wanting to be hired (5 for each group, and every individual gets 1 min max)
6:15pm - Talk 1: Visualising Big Data with Big Query and Google Looker Studio - Ranjana Dangol
7:00pm - Talk 2: Modernise web scraping: use a self-hosted LLM to extract data from (almost) any website - Geshan Manandhar
7:45pm - Raffle for the 2 JetBrains IDE licenses and 2 Programmable Conference ticket
8:15pm - Event end
Agenda
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Speakers
Ranjana Dangol - Service NSW (Software Engineer)
I am Ranjana Dangol, a software engineer currently working at Service NSW. I have completed my Master’s degree in Information Technology in 2019 and have developed expertise in software engineering and data analytics.
Geshan Manandhar - Simply Wall St (Senior Software Engineer)
A seasoned software engineer, with 15+ years of software engineering experience. He has a keen interest in REST architecture, microservices, serverless, and community building. After working in (fashion) e-commerce for a decade, he has moved domains to work in the finance side of things since 2022. He has spoken at tech conferences on 4 continents on various technical topics. He blogs about so…
Hosts
Rohit Maharjan
Reeya Maharajan - The Butcher's Block Group (Junior Developer)
Sajan Shrestha
Katharine Russell - Simply Wall St (Software Engineer)
Software Engineer and WTM Ambassador
Gary Lou - GDSC USYD (AI/ML Technical Lead)
Bachelor of Science (Data Science) and Bachelor of Laws at The University of Sydney.
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Partners
Mantel Group (https://mantelgroup.com.au/)
Mantel Group harnesses technologies that transform business operations in the real world. With capabilities spanning Cloud, Data, Digital, and Security, they merge emerging technologies with innovative design and industry expertise to enhance your business. With deep technical specialisation and as leading Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud partners, the depth and breadth our solutions offer is unparalleled. Mantel Group is your partner for end-to-end digital transformation.
Ranked in Australia's top 10 Best Workplaces by Great Place To Work Australia for four years in a row, we are people-focused and uphold strong values. Our culture champions trust, empowerment, and diversity, with a lean structure that emphasises collaboration, direct communication and equity.
JetBrains (https://www.jetbrains.com)
At JetBrains, code is our passion. Ever since we started, back in 2000, we have strived to make the strongest, most effective developer tools on earth. By automating routine checks and corrections, our tools speed up production, freeing developers to grow, discover and create.
Our Mission
We make professional software development a more productive and enjoyable experience.
Programmable (https://www.programmable.tech/)
Programmable is the Australian software engineering conference. The event celebrates fantastic developer content coupled with a focus on human connection; bringing people together to create serendipitous interactions.
Dented Code (https://dentedcode.com)
At Dented Code, we have developed an innovative coding Bootcamp approach to empower candidates with cutting-edge technology and skills to thrive in the Australian multi-billion digital economy. In 2021, Dented Code started transferring those programming skills to students through BootCamp courses, in-school workshops, community upskill initiatives as well as online tutorials. Through DetedCode’s BootCamp, students get equipped with in-demand coding and web development skills.
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Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-cloud-sydney-presents-gdg-cloud-sydney-meetup-feburary-2025/.