05/21/2026
Checking in with Jeremy Schroeder on Day 2 of Google I/O:
Google I/O can be likened to a festival for developers. Held at the Shoreline Amphitheatre—the very same venue that first hosted Grateful Dead concerts—it served as a home base for them throughout their career. It even resembles one of their iconic logos when viewed from an aerial perspective. What I saw at I/O Day 2 were rockstars of a different domain: several big names at Google taking the stage. And much like those fiercely loyal Deadhead crowds of the past, the energy here is fueled by a collective passion of developers completely tuned into the same frequency, eagerly waiting to see where the music takes the technology next. Thank you, Mark Techson—I was thrilled to snag a photo with you, as I've watched from afar over the years.
Shoreline has now hosted ten I/O events, and it feels fitting that I’m already thinking about I/O 2027 and beyond. I guess I’m officially a fan. Another fun fact about the venue: it was built on a former garbage dump. There’s a beautiful analogy there. It makes me think about the web back in 1999 when I first started playing around with websites. While not necessarily a landfill, the early web was certainly a fragmented hodgepodge of technology where things were quickly thrown away and technologies died in real time.
Lately, it feels like that old digital scrapyard has taken a new form with the endless sea of so-called AI slop and static, unresponsive data cluttering the internet. But just like Shoreline repurposed its foundation, our industry is finding a way to build something incredible on top of it.
What that looks like in practice was scattered all over the venue today through some incredible, hands-on tech demos. I got to experience this new era firsthand, seeing how it's becoming about more than just using an app or visiting a website. Stepping into an AI-powered photo booth, trying out an agentic phone booth, ordering customized coffee, and even testing bleeding-edge Android XR glasses all offered a mind-blowing glimpse into how we might interact and compute in the VERY near future.
Lately, AI has already been supercharging our developers back home, making it easier and faster than ever for us to build beautiful, cutting-edge code behind the scenes. But the next step—the one on full display today—is enabling our clients and their end-users to benefit from these technologies directly. The future of the web is moving far beyond just a great-looking website with static information at your fingertips. Instead, we are looking at truly intelligent, interactive platforms that will bring an entirely new level of engagement to our projects moving forward.
Walking out of the amphitheater today, it’s clear that while the Bay Area might host the festival, the real work happens when we take these tools back to our own sandboxes. You don't need to be headquartered in Silicon Valley to build for the future. The takeaway from Day 2 isn't just that the technology is shifting—it’s that we have everything we need right back in Toledo to build these high-interactivity platforms ourselves. The toolkit just got a massive upgrade, and I'm ready to see what we can create with it.
