Google DevFest 2018
As I’ve been attending sessions by GDG Goa over the last few months, I had become used to maybe 2 sessions a meetup, with audience interactions and hands-on sessions. So, for the DevFest, I was expecting something similar with maybe a live stream of the Keynote. But the organizers went all out for this one and todays session made to the list of one of the best sessions I’ve attended.
The venue was 91 Springboard, a place in Goa getting popular with the tech community and the session started with the keynote by Biswajeet Mallik, the Regional lead for Google Developer Relations. Because of his passion for UX, the session turned into a discussion on ML and UX.
The keynote was followed by a couple of other sessions, discussing the various new open source technologies. A few of the sessions were as interesting as they sound!
Competitive coding and software development
This session was conducted by Mughda Mohapatra who spoke about why anyone should get into competitive coding? The pros include
- Time limit constraints
- Improve debugging skills
- Improves analytical skills
She also outlined how competitive coding helps build better coding skills and people can write cleaner codes.
The session also covered software development on a corporate level and how students do not have enough exposure to various models and frameworks used in the ever-evolving tech world.
Android, Firebase, and Flutter
Though Android has been around for almost a decade, development has been ever evolving with newer versions of Android Studio releasing and reaching more developers and the apps being built on a larger scale than they used to be. Also, add the ML frenzy and voila! we have a humongous field dedicated to developers curating to a wider end users(of the android epidemic, which I hope never goes away).
Prachi Malani explained the importance of the same and spoke of various upcoming platforms like flutter and languages like Kotlin and Java that are being used for app development right now.

Voice First World
As much as we joke about the “This is so sad Alexa, play despacito “ meme, virtual assistants have already started dominating households and voice searches are about to take over typed searches.
It was a brilliant session by Gaurav Mishra, outlining the importance of Voice integration in home automation and our day to day searches.
Web Development
The speaker, Prajakta Phadke did the impossible job of explaining the vast field of Web Development in one short session pretty amazingly, by giving the developers, who were interested in front-end or back-end, enough information so that they could start on their own.

And these all sessions were just the beginning of the day. There was a couple more interesting sessions post lunch, as good as the above-mentioned ones.

Raj Kunkolienkar covered cloud services pretty nicely.
A special mention to Devvrit who spoke about the importance of research in the tech field.

Another one of the sessions was on Tensorflow by Siddhinita Wandekar, where she spoke about how she used Tensorflow in a Devanagari OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
The last session of the day was by Gavin Mascarenhas who spoke about UI and UX: it’s past, present and future. We were also surprised with the last minute appearances by Ayush Jaiswal, co-founder of Pesto and Anuradha Goyal, the author of the Mouse Charmers: Digital Pioneers of India.
Kudos to team GDG Goa for arranging such an amazing session for the Tech Community of Goa!