Why you should attend GDG DevFest at your City

Recently I attended DevFest Pune 2023. It was a blast! If you are someone who hasn’t attended a GDG DevFest till now, this post is for you. I will tell you exactly why you need to be on the lookout for the tickets. Also I will be tagging LinkedIn accounts for as many people I can so that it’s easier for y’all to stalk.

First of all kudos to the organizers- Mr. Mahaveer Mutha, Ms. Namrata More, Mr. Swapnil Jathar and Ms. Pranoti Nandurkar for organizing an event at such a huge scale with such finesse and competence.

One could understand the craze amongst students about this event as the student tickets were out within 6 hours of announcement. I was lucky enough to get a ticket somehow. The fest had 27 different talks and 3 panel discussions distributed in 4 different sections.

The event started with Mr. Manoranjan Padhy as the welcome keynote speaker talking about Responsible AI and then Mr. Vishal Virani discussing how AI has impacted various aspects of our lives. We were also introduced to DhiWise, a programming platform where one can convert their designs into developer-friendly code., followed by live demos by their team.

I got to attend an interesting talk featuring Mr. Ajey Gore and Mr. Gautam Rege on how advancements in AI has caused disruptions in the industry and our day to day life. Some important words that I remember from the talk- uncomfortable, driver and redundant nor replaced. All the people who attended can testify that these words signify a rich, interesting context. I can undoubtedly say that out of all the talks, this one was my absolute favorite and I wanted the talk to last more.

I also got a chance to talk to Dr. Sonal Modi about women in tech and how one’s gender shouldn’t be a hinderance in their path.

Mrs. Mathangi Sri Ramachandran shed some light on how Yubi deals with loads of documentation with much human intervention. People at Yubi are trying to build tools which deal with a lot of sensitive and important paperwork.

Then we had the delicious lunch catered by none other than J. W. Mariott, Pune. There were a lot of fun activities planned- contests and fun games to win exciting goodies. I also ended up giving me resume out to representatives of different companies (yes, I carried a hard copy of my resume) and received some constructive suggestions as well.

Even in the second half we had a ton of talks and discussions planned, like basics of LLMs by Mr. Yogesh Kulkarni and insights on project management by Mr. Ayush Jain. One post is not enough to summarize all the talk and sessions we had. I also got to reconnect with all the GDSC Leads from sister colleges and started rolling the wheels on something else (we’ll be announcing soon). Last but not the least- the panel discussion on Diversity and Inclusion rounded up the day on the perfect note.

I went to the DevFest alone, but it’s a DevFest. One can talk to anyone and everyone. It was indeed a day spent well.