Attended GDG Devfest Chennai today

It’s been a while since I attended any conferences or meetups in Chennai. I was part of lots of groups before COVID and was attending regular meetups. After the lockdown, some older groups died down and lot of newer groups started doing it online.

I don’t really care about attending a webinar/ online meetup. I believe there are very few things that you can’t learn online on your own that you can learn in an online meetup. The main part of tech events for me is where I pretend to be socialising and end up having slightly awkward conversations with the speakers and co participants (/s).

So I was slightly excited to join the GDG devfest in person and few of our older ChennaiJS group members also joined the conference. The venue choice is actually good, I liked the IIT research park and their infra.

The conference itself was pretty good, not without some usual logistical issues. I was naive enough to just walk into the conference without any plan on what talks to attend to. I had a friend who planned everything and attended almost all of his planned talks. So that’s something I should aspire to in upcoming conferences.

Another interesting thing I found in this conference is that women participants were significantly higher than usual. It felt like 50%, but the organisers told it is around 36% and it is high because of some efforts from WomenTechMakers Chennai community. If you’re a woman working in tech, join them. They were also looking for volunteers to help them with organising.

Following the theme of this year, most of the talks were about AI and Google products one way or other. I don’t care about AI, especially the LLMs unless I’m paid to care about them. But I still feel that this is more AI focused conference and AI is not the only tech area we should focus. But I do understand the commercial limitations a conference group, especially the ones backed by corporates might have.

There were three talks I liked, first one is Goroutines by Anubhav Singh. It is about Goroutines and Channels for parallel programming where he mixed some sort of AI. I haven’t worked in Go, but I heard about routines. What made this talk interesting to me is the style of the speaker. His session was one of the most energetic one because he kept asking lot of questions and tried to include the audience into the talk too. He also had a cool live demo which users vote and change AI’s decisions. I do wish that he did more deep dive into coroutines than include AI, but still I liked this talk.

Second talk is about starting as an independent consultant by Bhavani Ravi in which she almost convinced me to quit my job and start my own thing. But I’m too anxious to stay calm without the promise of a pay check every month. But he gave a framework that anyone aspiring to be a freelancer could follow and iterate to make it work for them.

Final one is about some rollback strategy in distributed systems for individual customer data with the help of Opentelemetry logs by Gnanasuriyan from Freshworks. This talk actually had some interesting ideas to restore customer data/specific data to a previous point and a library to help us with it. But I couldn’t find any links to this talk or the library.

The lunch and snacks distribution could’ve been done better, it was a mess. This is India, you’re going to have a crowd problem at everything and should anticipate it while planning. I know the organisers and the vendors tried their best, but this is something they should work better. There were huge lines for food and it took very long to actually start lunch and I missed first 10-15 minutes talk.

But I’m glad I attended this event because I met few old buddies and few new people from Chennai. I’m hoping there will be future events and the tech scene revives itself and match the same energy as Bangalore.