My Experience at DevFest'23

I am not a travel person. So, I never bothered to be a part of any Technical Event. But, lately when I see photos and videos of events and people geeking out with each other, I started having an urge to be in a technical event, meet new people and learn different things.

To be honest, I avoided the registration for a long time and then finally decided, yes, I want to go and explore. So, filled up the registration form at commudle(in case you want to join me at another event).

One day before the event, I got a mail from the organizers regarding RSVP and entry pass. I was very excited to experience something different, something completely new to me.

I was so excited that I could barely sleep at night. Next morning, I and my friends, traveled to the location (Taj Vivanta, New Delhi).

First, we did our registration which includes scanning the entry passes and showing some ID proof. Then, we got a swag coupon, a food coupon, Devfest wristband and a cap. Then, we headed over to have breakfast. We got to meet some folks after that and finally, we got split to our own interest corners.

There were, in total, 8 tracks catering to different areas of interests, such as, Web, Mobile, AI and Startup, ML and Security, Cloud, Blockchain, Design, and Community. We had the agenda for the day on the mails, and QR codes were there to get the agenda. I am interested in Web Development, so I headed to Web Track.

It started with a Keynote and it was great to see my community (GDSC DCRUST) as community partner there. Then, there was talk by Saurabh Rajpal Sir, it was roundtable discussion on latest trends and industry needs. It was an highly interactive and engaging talk. I earned a swag in his talk, for answering a fellow on how to pursue as Web Developer, where I got a chance to give a shoutout to open source, EddieHub and BioDrop (You should also check it out! It's amazing!)

Another talk was on Web Accessibility by Nishant Sir. I got to learn a lot about which I had no idea. I learnt how to make web more accessible to those who use screen readers. This was more on technical stuff, such as building Accessibility Tree, choosing right colors, using tags other than <div> and <span>, etc. Overall, the talk was highly informative and if you wanna check more on this, head over to Aria Authoring Patterns Guidelines.

After two talks in Web Track, I moved to Community Lounge for talks on open source. There, I attended two talks, one by Daksh on 'Projects that got me 3M downloads' and another by Bhawna Chauhan, the founder of She Builds on '30 minutes of open source' where she briefed about MLH Fellowship process and how to get into it.

After these awesome talks, me and my friends gathered for lunch, shared our experience till then. We met some more people at lunch. Then again, we got split. This time, I headed to AI and Startup Track, out of curiosity. I got to learn about Graph Databases, their usecases and much more by Ghlen Nagels. Then, a few talks on secure AI and how to leverage it in industry efficiently and effectively.

Again, I made a switch to my all time favourite, Web track, this time for talks on effective code reviews and web rendering, where I got to learn about different rendering techniques and how to choose one for our specific usecase.

Finally, that was a wrap from all the awesome talks and we again gathered, did some chit-chats and headed to grab some snacks.

After the tea-time, we were instructed to move to Cloud Track for the final closing note by Karthik Padmanabhan, Developer Relations Lead at Google India and some group photos. Lastly, we queued to grab our swags and this is how this beautiful day ended.