Devfest Bangalore Experience: DAY 1
Today I went to Day - 1 of Google #Devfest organized by GDG Bangalore at The Lalit Ashok Hotel (Bangalore).
A massive Audience of 2000 tech enthuthiasts joined us in the invite only event. I was lucky to be there — I felt after getting there. The vibe was crazy & unmatched to any tech fest hosted.
Registration & Breakfast
We started with registrations, and after that, went to the waiting hall invited by Tea, Breakfast & Activities. There I joined my friends Umang Bhatt, Nishant Sharma & Aditya Gupta who came from Delhi & Mumbai just to attend this massive event. We clicked pictures at Devfest Booth with our lovely #Android, #Flutter & #Firebase symbols. There were other activities like Connect the dots, Foosball, Jenga, etc. to keep us all entertained while waiting for event to begin. The enviornment was very cosy, I need to appreciate the efforts of Organisers & Volunteers.
Then the event began with Keynote, and then separated into Track-1 (Mobile) & Track-2 (Web). We were in a dilemma because both tracks had lovely seminars we wanted to attend.
Keynote
The Keynote was super-awesome hosted in the Kalinga-1 Hall. The hall was massive, and it was unbelievably full with developers!!! It filled us more with energy, and on top of that the super-active host Anuj Char set fire on stage, taking our energy levels to next sky. Karthik Padmanabhan took us on journey of the Google Developers Group and how it uplifts the whole community. Meenu Gaba gave us window into how AI & ML is interweaved into our lives now and how its changing it. Then we moved to our seminar.
Morning Seminars
How to make safe & secure Apps (Track-1)
Hosted by Amrit Sanjeev, the seminar gave us peek into vulnerability slips we leave while developing android apps, and how attackers can use certain tools to exploit our app via network, storage or permissions. He also introduced us the tools that attackers commonly use (and insisting us not to use that on others’ apps). Then explained techniques about how we can *hopefully* secure our apps.
Snapchat Filters with Flutter’s CustomPainter & ML-Kit (Track-2)
Hoster by Pooja Bhaumik, It was one of the event that filled us with fun, knowledge & funny-knowledge. She talked about how we can build snapchat-like filters in flutter using ML-Kit & CustomPainter, also she built it on-stage while not going too deep into mathamatics of it. Then she took some questions on her topic while ignoring questions about her snapchat ID. Bummer. It was a fun & beautiful event, and there was an activity that let attendees win goodies too!
Lunch
While spending a lot of energy on events & interactions, our tummy craved for some food. It was lunch time, and we were at Hotel Lalit Ashok. No guesses, the food was super great.
We went for the food at backyard of Lalit Ashok hotel and It was a beautiful location that filled our hearts with woah! but not our stomachs. so we fetched our plates.
For starters we had Corn, Papad, and some other thing, I didn’t paid much attention to starters as I was ready for a full course meal! But there were more starters than I mentioned.
In the main course, there was something for everyone! Beans, Kadhai Paneer, Mixed Vegetable, Mutton, Chicken, and some more things. Also Roti, Rice & Salad obviously. The food was ungessably luscious. We had our lunch while gossiping about everything we experienced so far. But there was more for us.
Deserts! We were craving for desserts while our stomach was begging for mercy, but at last it compromised. We had Fudgy brownies, Icecream & Ras malai. What a deadly combination sir ji! We put those in our stomachs and felt it for some time then time was back for the events
Afternoon Seminars
Best Practices for designing apps for India (Track-2)
Hosted by charming Soham Mondal, the seminar gave us a deep look into how we ignore so many kind of people (and their situations) while making apps for “everyone”. He gave a list of scenarios we need to keep in mind while designing an app, like Internet Connectivity, Navigation, Transactions, etc. He also introduced us to a framework that they developed at Triveous that can help us design apps at best for our community. Truely a mind-opening session. I would like to appreciate the Design of Slides and the Presentation by Soham Mondal.
Taking Flutter App from boring to stunning (Track-1)
We had to rush to this seminar, because there was an overlap with Track-2 event which we were attending. So we went there and immediately realised what we lost.
Hosted by Pawan Kumar (Pawan Bhayya!!!), seminar had a separate aura! Pawan bhayya explained why a boring app is risky for the business, how can we spice up our apps with right font & colour choice. He also talked about adaptive design, Responsive UI, Micro-interactions & Animations. everything explained using code and memes only. He also introduced an animation libaray that made animations easy. His session was full of Life — and we missed all of that. We reached at the part where he coded the hover effect. Though, we were not that sad, as whole event was live on YouTube so we could watch it later.
Phew! Time for tea.
Tea Time!
We gathered in the same hall where we waited in beginning. We got our tea and chatted. We looked around at beautiful public that had one of their most amazing meetup of their year. Then we directed ourselves to activities and spent some time playing Jenga. Checked some social media and time was up.
Evening Seminars
Deep dive into Flutter webviews using Dart as backend (Track-1)
Hosted by Gayatri Devi & Ashwin Gopinathan, it was a full technical seminar where Ashwin live coded a backend API in Dart, and Gayatri showed us how we can use flutter webview to consume that API and interact with Javascript with Flutter! Pretty technical but concise!
We Cheated!
After all these seminars, we felt a little filled up with information & excitation. So we decided to cheat by skipping our next seminar and going to beautiful backyard of Hotel Lalit.
The backyard was lush-y and splashy with a big lawn and a blue pool. We decided to rest along side of pool and have a chat about every good of today, that brought chuckles & laughter to our faces. We chatted movies, shows, and we teased each other names — all in the beautiful environment of Lalit! We then started our photography session
Photography session was a hit, for all of us — as we got enough for our insta, fb, whatsapp, linkedIn, twitter and tinder too 😂
We were all ready to go home with these memories, but that was not it. How come DevFest is DevFest without goodies?
Had an amazing networking, learning, enjoying, feeling fulfilling day! Super thanks to the organisers (Vishal Pathik Gupta & Ananya), speakers, volunteers and to all the attendees to make this a memorable day of our lives
It was a no-brainerly super successfull event! and there was Day 2 too! Read by Day-2 experience. Both the Track-1 and Track-2 were Live on youtube if you want to attend the seminars.
Thanks for reading.
