I tune in to Google I/O every year. But this year felt different.
In the past, I watched as a consumer. I needed the updates, first to keep up, then to pass them on to my audience. I was a distributor of news, a passive relay between Google's stage and other people's feeds.
This year, my pen hit the paper differently.
I watched as a builder. I wasn't tracking announcements to repeat them; I was scanning each one for where I fit, where I could come in, and how. I took pages of hurried notes, not to summarize later, but to return to and explore. Somewhere between the keynote's opening and its close, a quiet shift happened: I stopped feeling like an observer of the future and started feeling like a participant in it.
Here's what I saw, and why it mattered to me.
