Happy 7DD Google Developers !

Dear Google lovers, supporters and friends, year of 2012 is already left in the past, a year full of events, competitions and just meetings with friends to enjoy a glass of beer. We can surely state that 2012 was a successful year during which our team expanded greatly and the increasing number of GDG groups’ members proves the fact that we are becoming better and better and expanding continuously.

Before passing to 2013 (which would be 7DD in Hexademical), we would like once again remember all the things we achieved during last year.

There was no doubt that GTUG’s Day Armenia 2011 year-end event would lift us to a new stage of development, and the expectations were met.

We started 2012 with a meeting in Gyumri city. Gyumri was acknowledged  about the activity of GTUG Armenia, after which we got inspired that activists from Gyumri city would join us in our further big events.

Till the end of the first half of the year we managed to have some meetings mainly to discuss organizational matters of an important event – April Hachathon.

At last long-awaited April came. This time GTUGers were to combinen Tsakhkadzor’s perfect nature and programming. Of course it was hard to combine two activities, as on one side Tsakhkadzor resorts were calling, on the other side the prizes Galaxy Nexus smartphone and HTC Flyer tablet provided by the general sponsor of the event  VivaCell MTS, were waiting for the winners of  hackathon. We do not know if the participants managed to enjoy the beauty of the nature, but the organizers and our special guests from GTUG Ufa and GTUG Tbilisi surely realized that Armenian developers can create final products (applications) for 2 days.
You can see the awesome pics of Tsakhkadzor event here.

So, GTUG Armenia was renamed to GDG Armenia and June ended with Google I/O Extended event. One of the GDG Armenia moderators, Vardan Grigoryan, took part in Google I/O 2012 event in San Francisco.

The second half of the year started with a Beer Meetup, during which we discussed technological innovations in I/O 2012 and, of course, congratulated some of the active group members for successful participation in Campus Party in Berlin. As you may already know, Privacy Manager application, created by Manvel Saroyan, which helps Google Chrome users to easily manage their privacy data, was recognized the winner of the mentioned event. And Manvel was invited to Germany for a week to improve and perfect his application in Google office.

In September 2012, Software Freedom Day was celebrated for the first time in Armenia by GDG Armenia. We had many interesting presentations about open source projects and programs.

On September 27 we had another meeting on occasion of 14 year anniversary of Google and enjoyed a special delicious Google cake with printed Google colors.

Year-end official activities were concluded by the Armenian-Georgian GDG meeting in Tbilisi. Armenian GDG members who won during hachathons in 2012 left for Tbilisi together with moderators of the group to meet their neighbor friends. The long waited meeting took place at last and Armenian-Georgian cooperation on the field of Google technologies entered into a new higher level.

But as mentioned, we concluded with this only the official part.

Later, another pleasant surprise was waiting for us: The group that won during gt hachathon consisting of Minas Keshishyan, Suren Abrahamyan and Harutyun Ter-Minasyan, won another prize during Hackathon[YAN] 2012 and was recognized the winner of the best Android application nomination.

As for the final closing of the year, we had a G-Mas meeting, during which a special photo of  red-hat guys group was taken to participate in the Ingress competition. Later, the photo was recognized as the winner of the competition.

As you can see 2012 was full of events, development and victories. Though there were some events (for example DevFest Armenia) which we unfortunately couldn't organize, but we surely plan to organize those events during the first half of 2013.

What about our concrete plans for 2013, we will inform you at the end of February 2013.

Yours respectfully,

GDG Armenia :)