Marko Gargenta Expert Profile
Marko founded Marakana back in 2001 to help underprivileged youth, minorities, and inner-city kids learn web technologies and get ahead in life. So Marakana emerged with goal of helping people get better at what they do professionally, focused on open source software training.
Marko is the developer of Marakana Android Training series. He has taught Android for companies such as Sony-Ericsson, Qualcomm, Ericsson Canada, and many others. Marko is a co-founder of San Francisco Android Users Group and regularly teaches Android Bootcamp at Marakana.
Marko is author of Learning Android book published by O'Reilly Media. This book is based on Android Bootcamp and incorporates best learning practices for new developers to start creating applications for this exciting open source mobile platform.
Marko is also the co-chair of Android Open, an O'Reilly conference focusing on Android ecosystem.
In 2006 Marko Gargenta published "PHP and MySQL By Example", a collection on PHP examples. The book was published by Prentice Hall, world's largest technology publisher and has been also translated to Spanish.
Marko Gargenta obtained his Bachelor of Mathematics Degree from University of Waterloo (Canada's MIT) and has been developing in Java since 1996. He lives in San Francisco, California.
Speaking Engagements
- AnDevCon, SF, May 14-17 2012
- IEEE, Silicon Valley, CA, May 7 2012
- Mobile360Live, London, UK, April 2012
- MobileTechCon 2012, Munich, Germany, March 2012
- DroidCon 2012, Berlin, Germany, March 2012
- Android Builders Summit, SF Bay Area, Feb 2012
- Sprint Developers Conference, Santa Clara, CA
- Android Open conference, October 9-11, San Francisco, CA
- OSCON, July 25, Portland, OR
- Open Android webcast, July 8, 2011
- AnDevCon, March 7-9, 2011, San Francisco, CA
- Sprint Developer Conference, October 26-28, 2010, Santa Clara, CA
- OSCON: Android for Java Developers on July 19, 2010, Portland, OR
- Snaptic: Android for Java Developers, May 27, SF, CA
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SF Bay Area Chapter May 1, 2010
- IEEE Computer Society "Android Night" on April 13, 2010
- Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010: Android for Java Developers, March 16, 2010, Gotheborg, Sweden
- SFAndroid: Learn about Android Internals and NDK, SF
- SFAgile: Scrum Overview at Microsoft, SF
- SFAndroid: Learn about Data Persistence in Android
- SFAndroid: Learn how to develop for Android, beyond the HelloWorld
- Software Development Forum, Mobile SIG: Android Overview
- Open Source Conference (OSCON): A 30000-foot View of the Android Platform
Marko's Interview on Android at OSCON 2011
Marko's Interview on Android at OSCON 2010
Book by Marko: PHP and MySQL by Example (Prentice Hall)
Marko Gargenta the co-author of PHP and MySQL by Example, a by-example book published by Prentice Hall (world's largest tech publisher). Marko has been tinkering with the web since Mosaic browser hit the net in 1994. Marko is now a Zend Certified Engineer and instructor for most of the Zend PHP classes, with fine focus on advanced PHP topics such as Zend Framework. Marko is big on Agile development processes, eXtreme Programming, and is a Certified ScrumMaster. He's a frequent speaker at Bay Area users' groups, including SFAgile.org (which he runs), SFJava.org and SFAndroid.org (which he co-founded). Marko's PHP specialty is bringing grownup concepts such as OOP, Agile, and the design patterns to the PHP community. Marko's other specialties are Java and Android.
Android Meetup Group Organized by Marko
Marakana team organizes and runs the San Francisco Android Users' Group - an interactive group of Android developers. In our monthly meetings, we discuss Android landscape from both technology and business angles. We often have great presentations by industry experts, group discussions, as well as hands-on sessions. If you are in San Francisco Bay Area, we encourage you to join the group and meet other Android developers.
SDC 2010
Marko speaks at Scandinavian Developer Conference. Come by and say hi if you are in Göteborg.
Expertise
| Java | PHP | XML | Apache |
| JavaEE | Ajax | XSL | JavaScript |
| CSS | HTML | OOP | Objective-C |
| MySQL | SQL | AWT | Swing |
| Scrum Project Management | Agile | Android | Spark |
Upcoming Schedule
Marko Gargenta is scheduled to teach the following classes:
| Course | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Android™ Security | Jun 7 - Jun 8 | Motorola Solutions |
| Android™ Internals | Sep 4 - Sep 7 | San Francisco |
| Android™ Internals | Nov 26 - Nov 29 | New York City |
| Intro to Android™ | Dec 10 - Dec 12 | San Francisco |
| Android™ Bootcamp | Dec 10 - Dec 14 | San Francisco |
| Advanced Android™ | Dec 13 - Dec 14 | San Francisco |
Classes in bold are guaranteed to run!
[top] Student Testimonials
Marko was great, he explained stuff really well, he gave personal attention to everybody in the class. He knew his stuff very well and he kept the class at the right pace. Thanks Marko!! It was great having you here..
The Android Bootcamp course was extremely informative and provided an excellent overview of the Android platform and how to make the most of your application. The unique hands-on learning experienced helped put this course above the rest!
Very little to improve on. Marko was prepared, well spoken, and knowledgeable on the subject matter. Once he saw the types of projects we were going to use the training for, he tailored the course to meet those needs, and did it on the fly. I leave this course much more prepared than I was a week ago. The best training course I've ever attended, hands down. Very focused, prepared, and well-taught. Lessons and examples were tailored to my group's needs. I'm very impressed.
I found the material very interesting and helpful. I learned a lot from the course. Thanks,
Excellent range and depth of subject matter knowledge, presentation skills, pacing, etc.
Good job Marko. Well rounded effort. This was a good course to get into android. The trainer (Marko) did a good job customizing the course for us and then covering all the topics of interest for us. His command of the tool helped in making this a good course.
Great content and excellent presenter and tutor!
Great Course! I learrned alot!
I thought the training was very informative. The instructor painted a great picture of today's environment as well as the future outlook.
Instructor very knowledgable on Android. Great course overall for Android
Well done!
Great Class and great Instructor. He was very knowledgable.
Thank you very much for your great presentation
This course exceeded my expectations! I learned more in a day about Android than I picked up over the past few years. A great course!
Good material.
Great Teacher!
The Android Bootcamp class was very well taught with beautiful illustrations (both slides and examples). I really appreciated the on-the-spot learning as we developed our own application in class. Marko is very well versed in Android and is able to communicate effectively to the students. I felt that my questions were answered. Marko also adjusted the flow of the course based upon the interests of the students. We touched both on the internals of Android, the evolution of Android, and some basic security issues. I would recommend this course to any level developer.
Look forward to your Android Native Development courses.
Overall, I was very impressed with the course, and I feel very confident designing Android applications.
Cannot think of a bad thing to say about the instructor, the presentation or the material. The instructor was extremely well-prepared and always professional while remaining friendly and accessible. His knowledge was outstanding, allowing him to troubleshoot or walk us through new material on the fly. The prepared material was nearly ideal to cover the range of topics, presented in an order that kept the course both understandable and challenging.
Excellent content. Great way to motivate both employees and customers as to the capabilities android can offer for business or consumer needs.
Great training! The training really knows Android Internals. Android Application lifecycle, startup and filesystem was explain really well.
Overall, it was an excellent course - both in content and presentation.
Great job! Hard to think of anything to improve. Marko did a fabulous job! This course saved weeks (or more) of development time! This course material was very up to date and relevant to our needs. The instructor (Marko) was extremely knowledgeable and was able to address every concern without hesitation. Best class I ever attended!
I have attended multiple training sessions over a period of 10 years but this is by far the best custom training I have been part of. Now I will have a short turnaround time to implement what I learned in my project thanks to the technical clarifications provided by Marko!
Far exceeded my expectations and made me much more of a subject matter expert for Android!
Great class. Tailored content to fit participants needs. Marko answered questions related to specific use-cases, and if didn't know the answer, then showed us how to find answer via lab experiment. Thank you!
The Android Bootcamp taught by Marko Gargenta is just what our company needed to be successful at releasing our first Android application. Marakana's quick response to our call for an onsite, tailored class helped us to achieve our desired time to market as well.
Good knowledge!
The course was structured with well thought out progression. The course started very simple and by the end of the course, we had developed a fairly complex working mobile app... wooo hooo :). The components implemented in our example provided applicable foundation to get me started immediately upon my return to the office. Great job, Marko!!!
