Author: Gareth Jones

Gather round disciples, your master is finally ready to reveal the ultimate secrets of the senior developers. Learn how to transform complex, unreadable code into poetry. Or, more accurately, learn what goes through an old developer's head when he's trying to clean up some dodgy code.

When I started out as a developer the internet was made of wood and owl feathers, held together with spit, pluck, gumption and whatever else it is that you kids today no longer seem to have (job security? the possibility of owning your own home? a habitable climate?). We had to chisel our code out of the rocks 26 hours a day, 10 days a week, wait two years for it to compile, and the only way of knowing if it worked was if the old wise woman of the company divined the error messages in the entrails of a junior developer. I am now that wise old woman, and so I must pass on the things I have learned.

Due to me being kind of a big deal around here, I was sent to Google Next 18 last week. It's a two-and-a-half-day conference in San Francisco, all about Google Cloud. I made some exciting discoveries, which I will share with you, and also went to some talks or something.
OK Google, generate a clickbait title for my Google I/O 2017 blog post I've generated a title, Gareth. What would you like to add next? OK Google, I'm a bit jet lagged - remind me what I saw at Google I/O 2017 I would love to help, Gareth, but I'm going to need a little more information. Would you like that information in chronological order, or grouped by topic?
Do you have an unreasonable fear of cronjobs? Find spinning up VMs to be a colossal waste of your towering intellect? Does the thought of checking a folder regularly for updates fill you with an apoplectic rage? If so, you should probably get some help. Maybe find another line of work. In the meantime, here's one way to ease your regular file processing anxieties. With just one application of Google Cloud Functions, eased gently up your Dataflow Pipeline, you can find lasting relief from troublesome cronjobs.