A jam session.
Not a hackathon.
GDG Coding Jams transform standard tech meetups into vibrant, hands-on community sandboxes where developers actually build together. Two hours, a slice of pizza, Google’s AI stack — and a real prototype walking out the door.
Four beats, and you’re out with a working app.
No prep required. No prior project. Drop in to any track on any week.
Bring a laptop. No prep, no prior project. The room handles the rest.
Your chapter has one for the week, or you bring your own idea. Two minutes of deciding what you're making.
AI does the typing; you direct it. Everyone's building at once, so the person next to you is the fastest way past a wall.
Two minutes each, screen-shared from your seat. Then it goes on the showcase — half-finished is welcome.
A jam, not a hackathon.
Think of a musical jam or an after-work pottery class. Instruments out, a creative prompt, two hours of making something tangible alongside friends. We bring that energy to software.
No sit-and-listen tech talks. No 48-hour competitive hackathon grind. Just blueprints, tech access, and collaborative space.
Developers learn Google's AI tools best when they're actively building. We remove the blank-page syndrome.
Materials, timelines, and goals provided. Organizers book a room and bring the snacks.
Collaborative problem-solving builds a deeper network than passive networking ever does.
Two hours, four movements.
Predictable, fast-paced, engaging. We keep the talking short and the building long. Organizers act as facilitators, guiding the room through a unified creative process.
The goal in the room is always to ship the core feature in 45 minutes — the one thing that proves the concept. Push toward the polished version on your own time.
- 0:00 – 0:15Intro
Grab a name tag and a slice, say hello to the instructor, and meet the people either side of you — you'll be asking them things later, so it pays to know their names now. Low pressure, high creativity, ship something messy. Then a quick word on what the room is building tonight, and you're off.
- 0:15 – 0:30Credits & setup
The instructor shares the Google Cloud credits with the room. Everyone gets their environment ready — whichever tool they brought. Nobody should be installing anything once the build starts.
- 0:30 – 1:35Build
Heads down, and enjoy it — this is the part everyone came for. The agent does the typing; you decide what it's making. Ask the room when you get stuck; someone two seats away hit the same wall ten minutes ago. Want more structure? The codelab walks the spec-driven route — Setup → Plan → Review → Build → API → Verify — but nobody has to follow it.
- 1:35 – 2:00Share & submit
Show the room what you made — two minutes, screen-shared from your seat. Half-finished is welcome; the wobbly ones are usually the most interesting. Say what surprised you along the way, and cheer for everyone else while you're at it. Then submit your build before you leave. This is the one thing not to skip — it's what puts your name and your chapter on the showcase, and it takes about two minutes.
Set your own topic. Or borrow a built-in one.
The organizer running the room decides what it builds. Point at your own dataset, take on something your city actually needs, or write a brief from scratch — the format holds either way, because the two hours are what make it a jam, not the subject.
No idea where to start? Borrow a built-in topic instead. Most of them set one requirement — build an Android app, put it on a map, make it multiplayer — and leave what to build to each participant, so the room shares a constraint rather than a spec. Two are complete, drop-in projects with a brief and a starter repo already written, for a room that would rather follow along.
None of them depend on each other. Pick whichever sounds most fun for your community and go.
- Open topics — one requirement, everyone picks their own build
- Drop-in projects — a written brief and a starter repo to follow
- Your own topic — write a brief from scratch, or bring a dataset
- 💡Build your own idea — Build the idea you have been planning. There is no topic this session.
- 🌱AI for Good — A multi-chapter regional initiative uniting chapters around annually rotating societal challenges to build solutions with Google's applied AI ecosystem.
- 📱Build an Android app — Build an Android app and install it on your own device. You decide what the app does.
- 🗺️Put it on the map — Build an application that uses real map data. You decide what it shows.
- 🎮Make it multiplayer — Build something two or more people use at the same time. You decide what it is.
- 📊Build with a dataset — Choose a public dataset and build something with it. You decide what question to ask.
- 🎙️Build with the Live API — Build something that responds while the user is still speaking or showing it something. You decide what it responds to.
- 🤖Build an agent — Build something that chooses which tools to use instead of answering directly. You decide what it works on.
- 👀Build with what the camera sees — Build something whose main input is an image rather than typed text. You decide what it looks at.
- 🔍Answer from your own documents — Build something that answers questions from documents you provide. You decide which documents.
- ✨Generate the interface — Build something that generates a different interface for each request. You decide the subject.
- 🧊FridgeChef — Type what's in your fridge and get one recipe back, with a photo of the dish.
- 💼BulletProof — Paste a resume and a job posting, and get tailored bullets back.
Ready to jam?
Open any track and ship a working app in the next 45 minutes. Or grab the kit and host a jam in your city.