software engineer, public speaker, raccoon enthusiast
Howdy! 🤠 I'm Bret, a software engineer and raccoon fan.
I'm a passionate full-stack web developer and former Developer
Advocate at Google where I focused on serverless Google Cloud
products like Cloud Functions, App Engine and Firebase.
I love to travel and have been to 70+ countries 🌍.
I've also been an avid runner, completing 19 half marathons and
5 full marathons.
Kubernetes and Istio provide a great foundation for orchestrating,
monitoring, and scaling your apps. They're open source and work great
in your data center or in any major cloud. Meanwhile, the serverless
development model has empowered devs to build software faster than
ever by eliminating concerns like scaling, networking, load
balancing, OS patching, etc.
Combine the power of Kubernetes with the
ease of use of serverless to create new, powerful and flexible
development experiences.
Talk summary:
Google Assistant is the conversational user interface for Android, iPhone,
and Google Home devices that helps you get things done in your world.
Come learn how to build a custom Action and see how the same
tools can help you build a serverless chatbot for Slack and more using
Google Cloud Platform.
In 2015 I went to Tanzania to summit Mount Kilimanjaro. It
is nicknamed the "Roof of Africa" and at 9,341 ft (5,895m)
tall it's the highest freestanding mountain in the world!
Video summary:
Former Googler and Racker Bret McGowen
discusses the importance of monitoring the costs of hosting your app in
the Rackspace Cloud using the tool Cloudability.
Cloudability was a service that let you monitor and analyze your cloud spend across
clouds and vendors.
This is a vintage video from 2013 which means it's hopelessly out of date.
Functions, apps, and containers oh my!
Serverless on Google Cloud covers a lot: compute, Cloud Functions,
Cloud Run, App Engine, containers, Kubernetes, and Firebase.
From Google New York (NYC) advocate Bret McGowen in 2018.
Vintage video (2013): Racker developer Bret McGowen guides you on how to set up Stripe in your
Ruby on Rails web application so that you can easily accept online
payments. Follow along with the coding exercise as well.
Prior to Google, I worked in the cloud industry at
Rackspace
as a software engineer. Before that, I led engineering teams at
an e-commerce company, a government laboratory, non-profits and
tried my hand at creating two startups. I'm often on the running trail, volleyball court or
kickball field.
I earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Texas
A&M University. You can find me on Twitter at
@BretMcG or @BretMcGowen.
