Mete Atamel

Dialogflow is a developer platform for building voice or text-based conversational apps on a number of platforms such as Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Twilio, Skype and more. Earlier this year, we used Dialogflow to build a Google Assistant app and extended it to use the power of Google Cloud. You can read more about it on Google Cloud blog here, see the app code on GitHub here and one of my talk videos about the app is here.

Istio 1.0 is finally announced! In this post, I updated my previous Istio 101 post with Istio 1.0 specific instructions. Most of the instructions are the same but with a few minor differences about where things live (folder names/locations changed) and also most commands now default to kubectl instead of istioctl.

For those of you who haven’t read my Istio 101 post, I show how to install Istio 1.0 on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), deploy the sample BookInfo app and show some of the add-ons and traffic routing.

I use my Google Home all the time to check the weather before leaving home, set up alarms, listen to music, but I never considered writing an app for it. What does it take to write an app for the Google Home assistant? And can we make it smarter by leveraging Google Cloud? Those were the questions that my colleague Chris Bacon, and I were thinking about when we decided to build a demo for a conference talk.

Last week was a quite interesting week in terms of travel. First I got to visit Zurich again after a while for .NET Day and then I got to visit the Croatian coastal town Split for the first time for Shift Conference.

.NET Days in Zurich

When I used to work at Adobe, part of my team was based in Basel, Switzerland. As a result, I used to visit Basel, Zurich and other Swiss cities quite often. Since I left Adobe, I visited Switzerland only once 2 years ago. I was naturally excited to visit Zurich again for .NET Day.

In one of my previous posts, I showed how to install Istio on minikube and deploy the sample BookInfo app. A new Istio version is out (0.8.0) with a lot of changes, especially changes on traffic management, which made my steps in the previous post a little obsolete.

In this post, I want to show how to install Istio 0.8.0 on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), deploy the sample BookInfo app and show some of the add-ons and traffic routing.

After my trip in Istanbul, I visited my parents in Nicosia, Cyprus for a long weekend. Then, I stopped by in Amsterdam for Codemotion before coming back to London for Devoxx 4 cities in 4 countries in 1 week was exhausting but also a lot of fun in many ways.

Codemotion Amsterdam

Amsterdam is almost a second home to me nowadays. There’s a great tech scene and a lot of tech events throughout the year, as a result, I end up visiting Amsterdam at least 2–3 times a year.

Istanbul is one of those crazy dynamic cities with friendly people, amazing history, great shopping and above all, a food heaven. Naturally, I was excited to be back for Java Day Istanbul conference.

I came a day early to meet with a partner and visit a customer. They had lots of questions on Kubernetes and hybrid-cloud. It was quite useful for me to hear about their challenges about moving to the cloud and propose some solutions.

After my time in Beijing, I flew back to the UK but instead of London, I went to Manchester for IPExpo conference. The first time I visited Manchester was 20 years ago. I was a 15 year old high school kid and I visited my great aunt and uncle one summer with my sister. I remember I had such a good time back then.

Unfortunately, I never had a chance to visit Manchester again and it was quite nostalgic for me to be back. I was hoping that I would remember Manchester a little bit but to my surprise, it was like a brand new city to me.

Visiting a new country is always extra special for me and a couple of weeks ago, I got to do just that and visited Beijing, China for the first time.

After TDC in Floripa, I flew to Beijing for QCon conference and for a Google Developer Group (GDG) meetup. It was the first time for me in China (my 48th country!) and first time speaking at QCon, so I was naturally excited. I didn’t know what to expect in Beijing but I was pleasantly surprised. Beijing is a modern city with good public transportation and interesting sites to visit. I got the feeling that it’s also very international with many expats, definitely more than I expected. I visited the iconic sites like Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall of China. I also visited Google’s Beijing office (my 35th Google office visit!)

Last week, I was in my favorite country, Brazil, for The Developer Conference (TDC) in Florianópolis (aka Floripa). I went to Brazil for the first time last July. Since then, I’ve been there 3 more times and I gradually fell in love with it. People are friendly, their BBQ is amazing, scenery is beautiful. I always have a good time in Brazil and this time wasn’t an exception.

In all previous times, I was mainly in Sao Paulo for a conference followed by a short trip to Rio (my favorite city!) for myself. This time, I went to Florianópolis which is a city to the south of Sao Paulo. It has a similar feeling as Rio (i.e. beach town) but smaller and felt safer than Rio. It had amazing views of mountains and sea, great food and friendly people, as always the case with Brazil.