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The DevFest Community Workshop Experience: Building Real Agents Together Christina Lin Developer Relations Engineering Manager This week we kicked off the DevFest season in North America at Google Hudson Square in New York City with 80 engineers packed into the room. Typical technical workshops hand you a finished repo, tell you to blindly paste blocks of code into your terminal, and hope nothing crashes. You walk away with green checkmarks, but your brain stays on autopilot. We've introduced a completely different experience called Workbench. Workbench focuses on understanding core ideas and architectural models rather than obsessing over syntax and code snippets. Instead of getting bogged down in boilerplate, engineers spent the day grappling with the actual mental models behind graph engineering, self-evolving architectures, and automated self-patching harnesses. A glimpse into the Workshop Experience At the DevFest Community Workshop, we spent one intense day building long-running, self-evolving multi-agent systems powered by Google's agentic stack. Ricky Robinett, Senior Director of Developer Marketing, kicked off the day by diagnosing why so many engineering teams hit a wall with agents. Ricky broke down why prompt engineering fails as a safety mechanism: English is just a probabilistic suggestion, not an execution boundary. Right after Ricky, Rachel Francois, Google Developer Groups (GDG) North America Program Lead, took the stage alongside GDG Brooklyn organizers to welcome the community and spotlight the power of local developer chapters. They set the tone for the entire day, reminding everyone that building durable software works best as a team sport where engineers share real-world patterns and build local networks that outlast any single framework. Getting hands on with labs Annie Wang & Christina Lin, Americas DevRel Team members, led the morning lab that put those runtime ideas to work. Attendees explored Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK), Veo 3.1, Memory Bank on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and RAG Engine on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Through Workbench, developers grasped the principle of separating state from active compute for long running tasks. Workflows paused cleanly mid-execution, waited out asynchronous human approvals, and resumed without running up idle compute costs. After lunch, Logan Hennessy, Americas Developer Relations Engineer (DRE), and Kartik Derasari, Google Developer Expert (GDE), led a lab using auction history as insight for better bidding strategy. Attendees worked through the architecture by integrating BigQuery data into autonomous data engineering pipelines, reasoning about deterministic bidding logic and adding eval-gated, self-patching harnesses that catch spend anomalies and update runtime execution safely. Between lab blocks, we ran fast-paced speed quizzes where developers raced to lock in their answers as quickly as possible. Screens flashed, fingers flew across keyboards, and seconds made the difference between topping the leaderboard or dropping five spots. Nothing beats watching a room full of serious engineers completely lose their cool over a live quiz leaderboard. Join a DevFest Community Workshop this fall New York was only round one. We are taking this exact experience on tour to five more cities this fall. Find your city and grab your seat before spots fill up: - Sunnyvale on September 30 - Washington DC on October 6 - Atlanta on October 30 (as a part of DevFest Atlanta) - Seattle on November 4 - Boston on November 10
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