My experience at the GDG DevFest 2018!

It was the day of a few firsts (the first time I was a corporate flyer, the first time Google developers from Silicon valley were coming upto us asking us about our project and the first time I rode a bicycle to generate energy to light up bulbs!) and a day of many mind-boggling experiences.

The first session I attended was titled ‘Async with Kotlin Coroutines’. The first person I met was an NLP researcher working in Microsoft. I was surrounded by extremely passionate developers. The saying ‘If you are the smartest in the room, you’re in the wrong room’ didn’t leave my head that day and I was grateful I was a part of that crowd and that I could learn a lot from them, their projects and maybe even share about mine. But, on the other hand I also felt strongly that I belonged there!

Shortly after the first session, I headed to the sandbox area where we were supposed to showcase our actions.

There seems to be a technical glitch. But one of the things we asked him what young engineers should keep in mind on their journey toward tomorrow’s developers and he said, to not just focus on shiny things but get your basics right, like data structures , algorithms etc. Because shiny things might go away and you will be left with nothing. But if your core concepts are right, you can build anything and that is what people will pay you for.

All the winners were then gifted a Google Home Mini and soon after that many developers started coming to our booths asking about our projects. Many of them were PhD students from IISc, entrepreneurs, etc. It was fun to see their curiosity and also to know about what their work deals with.

A few other amazing people I got to meet were :

Post lunch, I attended three sessions , two on DialogFlow and one on TensorFlow. The number of attendees was huge and the talks were captivating. How beautiful it is when a whole hall full of people is lost in concepts, ideas, tools and projects! We were even told many useful things, like for example — the online courses that are good to take when you’re exploring certain tools and platforms ( here, in the case of Tensorflow).

Farha and I tried out the bicycle contest and ended up getting stickers!

Oh, and I met this guy as well!

A huge thanks to GDG, WTM, and everyone involved in creating and fostering these amazing communities!

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