GDG Sydney

GDG Sydney is back for a meetup this July!
Join us for an evening of exciting technical talks, community connections, and knowledge sharing.

## Come Hire!

The meetup allocates 10 minutes to people seeking technical jobs or with open roles at their company. If you’re hiring or job hunting, this is your chance to connect with the community.
👉 This meetup is in-person only. There are no plans to stream the event.

## Talks

### Talk 1: Navigating the Final Mile with Next-Gen Google Maps and Grounded AI

In the fast-paced world of logistics and supply chain management, minutes translate directly to margins. Yet, traditional geolocation tools often fall short at the most critical stage: the final mile. Simultaneously, while Generative AI promises to revolutionize dispatching, Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently lack real-world spatial awareness.
In this session, Homing will share the latest, cutting-edge updates to the Google Maps Platform and demonstrate how to apply them to solve these exact operational bottlenecks.

#### Key Takeaways

• Precision Geocoding: A deep dive into Geocoding API v4, showcasing its shift toward granular sub-destinations and cloud-native security.
• AI with Spatial Awareness: An introduction to Maps Grounding Lite—a game-changing tool that anchors AI assistants with real-time, verified Google Maps data.
• Live Mobile App Demonstration: See firsthand how Grounding Lite leverages named POIs and precise building outlines to enable seamless booking and orientation for pickups—even when users are disoriented or facing poor GPS signals.
• Conquering Final-Mile Hurdles: Discover how to automatically account for common mapping obstacles like stacked roads and complex exit gates.

Finally, Homing will showcase these technologies in action through Master Planner, demonstrating how pairing precision geocoding with grounded AI creates a highly efficient, resilient, and intelligent fleet ecosystem.

#### About the speaker

Homing Tam brings over 15 years of rich experience spanning sales engineering and product management. A lifelong map enthusiast, he previously served as the Principal Product Manager at Lalamove, leading product development across location-based solutions, payment, and operations. He currently drives technical sales and solutions at Master Concept, Google’s premier partner in the APAC region.

## Event Schedule

• 5:30pm - Event doors open
• 5:45pm - Introduction and hiring connect (5 mins for each group, every participant gets up to 1 min)
• 6:00pm - Talk 1: Navigating the Final Mile with Next-Gen Google Maps and Grounded AI — Homing Tam
• 7:00pm - Raffle for 2 JetBrains IDE licenses and 2 programmable tickets
• 7:30pm - Event end

## Our Partners

Join GDG Sydney for a hands-on workshop exploring how to build practical AI systems with Google ADK and FastAPI. In this session, we’ll move from building a basic agent to exposing it as a production-ready API, with a focus on developer-friendly workflows, clean architecture, and real-world deployment patterns.

This workshop is designed for developers, AI builders, and technical enthusiasts who want to learn how to connect agent logic with modern Python web APIs. Whether you are experimenting with LLM agents or planning to ship AI-powered services, this session will give you a solid starting point.

About the Speaker
Ashmi Banerjee is an Applied AI researcher and doctoral candidate at the Technical University of Munich, where her work focuses on recommender systems, human-centered AI, and responsible machine learning. She brings both academic depth and practical industry experience to her work, with a strong interest in building AI systems that are trustworthy, useful, and grounded in real-world needs. She is also a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning and a Women Techmakers Ambassador, reflecting her active leadership in the broader tech community.

About the Workshop
Agent-based AI systems help structure complex LLM-powered applications, but integrating them into real-world systems remains a practical challenge. In this workshop, participants build a travel-planning AI agent using Google ADK and Python, moving from interactive experiments to production-ready execution. We cover agent runtimes, async programming, and exposing agents via FastAPI. The workshop is hands-on and code-focused, aimed at Python developers who want to build, debug, and deploy AI systems.

What you will learn:

What an AI agent is and how Google ADK structures one.

How to set up a local development environment for the workshop.

How to manage conversation state and run an agent pipeline.

How to connect an agent to FastAPI endpoints.

How to run the FastAPI server locally and test the API.

How this setup supports deployment, containerization, and real-world AI applications.

Prerequisites

Don't forget your laptops!

Python 3.10 or later.

An IDE such as VS Code or PyCharm.

uv installed, if you don’t already have it.

A Google API key or Vertex AI credentials, depending on your setup.

Come along to learn, build, and connect with the GDG Sydney community while exploring a modern stack for AI agent development!

Disclaimer

A ticket does not guarantee entry; entry is first come, first served.

Bring your laptops; this is a hands-on event.