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.
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.
Vimeo video from Node Summit 2017
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!
It was even featured on the Texas A&M alumni Facebook account: Bret McGowen and Carla Beutlich on Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Read more about my visits to Africa.
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This is a vintage video from 2013 which means it's hopelessly out of date.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.
I'll slowly add more slide decks to my Bret McGowen - Google NYC Speaker Deck page.
From London to Tokyo to Sydney and much more, I used to love going on runs when traveling.
Check out those and more as I start posting some of my old travel runs on my running page.
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.
I'm into nachos, running, volleyball, and raccoons. Here's me meeting an awesome raccoon:
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.
