Kota Kinabalu Day 1

+Celine, Mama +Chelle, +Wayne,  Mitch, +Svetlana and I went to Kota Kinabalu last November 16-18 to help GDG Kota Kinabalu in their first GDG DevFest.

All of us, except Mama Chelle who went to KK earlier, arrived in Kota Kinabalu International Airport around one in the morning. +Lorna picked us up in the airport and brought us to King Park Hotel where we stayed for the night.

We wake up early in the morning and had breakfast in King Park Cafe. The venue for the DevFest, Wisma Bandaraya, is just two blocks away (around five minutes walk) from the hotel. We met some of the organizers there. I found out about the Ingress Sabah. They have a great cross-faction relationships there. I also got updates about the Shard in KK.

The event started with a speech from the Sabah State Minister of Resource & IT Development and the keynote by Sebastian. Mitch is the first from us to talk. Her topic is about Mobile Trends. After her talk, Mitch, Svet, Loretta and I walked to the nearby mall (Centre Point Sabah) to exchange our money to Ringgit. I also need to buy an adapter and a local sim for mobile data. I bought a Digi sim and loaded some credits to it. The cost for the unli data was a bit expensive than in the Philippines but I think it was worth it.

We went back and Celine's talk about Google Apps for Education is already finished. I sat inside for +Marc Tan's  Google ADK/Arduino talk. It was the last talk before lunch. In the afternoon, there were two breakout sessions: App Engine on PHP (by Lorna) and Chrome Extensions. I discussed the basics of Chrome Apps and Extensions development. Below is the presentation I used in my talk.

After that, +Loretta talked about HTML5 Game Development. Lorna then had the closing speech after a few short talks about GSA and Ingress Sabah. Over-all, the event and the food were great!

Mama Chelle, Wayne, Mitch, Svet, Marcus, Loretta, Marc, Celine and I had dinner at Welcome Seafood Restaurant. We enjoyed the different seafood dishes. Because some of us needed to buy shorts and slippers and other things, we went to Centre Point Sabah. We then went to Pasar Malam Sinsuran to buy keychains and other stuff. Afterwards, we had cakes at Secret Recipe before going back to the hotel to rest.