DevFest Algiers 21: A Story to Tell!

What fits the tech community more than an annual big developers’ festival!! Where people find a place to meet experts, learn the latest updates from the tech world, and build something new!

With 10 successfully organized editions of this event, DevFest Algiers has reached perfection, each edition with its unique touch and impact. In its 10th edition, DevFest 21 Algiers was a tremendous success in the Algerian tech community and the MENA region as well, especially after the recession caused by the Covid19 pandemic, where tech enthusiasts couldn’t help but respond to the call and came to celebrate!

Let us first clarify some things! What is DevFest?

DevFests, short for “Developer Festival” are annual local tech events hosted by Google Developer Groups (GDG) around the world. Each DevFest event is crafted by its local organizers to fit the needs and interests of its local developer community. Whether it be through hands-on learning experiences, technical talks delivered in local languages by experts, or by simply meeting fellow local developers, DevFest attendees learn how to build together and innovate on Google’s developer tools.

DevFest Algiers is the GDG Algiers version. This festival is our marque event and a must-attend for developers. Edition after another, we try to step it up making it bigger and better than ever before while keeping its legacy objectives and key values of :

• Bringing together developers and technophiles of different skill levels in an annual celebration.
• Providing innovative content on the latest and future technologies by introducing a wide range of technical topics through hands-on workshops, training, activities, conferences, hackathons, and online and in-person meetings thus helping technology enthusiasts to apply their knowledge to create great products and thrive in both skills and networks.
• Offering a unique environment and a tremendous opportunity for students, professionals, and start-ups to connect with like-minded individuals and business experts.

The last edition of DevFest Algiers was beyond expectations and assumptions. As its name indicates, it was a big tech festival, where we had the chance to host several tracks, counting talks, workshops, challenges and indeed a big hackathon! Taking off with passion and eagerness for success, the event made a huge impact, thanks to the hard work and dedication our fabulous team has shown.

The Hackathon - Live AI:

Similar to every year, a hackathon took place for three consecutive days with the theme “Live AI”! We raised a call to find solutions for daily life problems using Ai based technologies and participants with different studies backgrounds accepted the challenge and formed teams to start the competition. We witnessed our warriors envisioning, visualizing, pondering, and materializing their astonishing ideas with the help of experienced and adept mentors.

The competition had an exciting twist to it with the presence of the LG track in the hackathon, three teams had the chance to work on this track and find a suitable solution for the ThinQ LG app, the ideas were innovative and the judges were impressed!

Following the final submissions, the solution proposed by every team was judged by professional expert judges. After seeing the final presentations, examining all ideas and considering several criteria, the three winning teams were chosen.

DevFest Hackathon had 1 winner but 13 bright ideas! ‘WARMY’ secured their 1st place by introducing a new AI concept for home safety that anyone can rely on in case of indoor accidents, and about our hackathon Younes Kebour one of the winning team members said :

Three days without sleep, three days of focus and hard work and 48 hours of doing cool things that matter, this was my experience in DevFest 21.

When we were awarded 1st prize in the Hackathon, we were beyond happy to have been recognized, especially since the turnout was quite overwhelming with all the amazing projects that have been presented.

Coming up with a good idea is not easy, coming up with a winning idea is even more difficult. We spent quite a lot of time brainstorming and shaping our vision, and we decided to work under the LG Electronics track. After taking a look at their smart electronic devices, and how they combine convenience and security, we thought of introducing a new concept for home safety where anyone can rely on our AI in case of house accidents.

Our system called CheQ will be implemented on the smart vacuum robots so while patrolling the house it will be capable of detecting if the person is lying down on the floor and then deciding whether he is in danger or not so that an emergency SMS will be sent for help.

48 hours seems like a lot of time, however, when you have to work on a complex AI, cool 3d demonstrations and a live demo for the judges; 48 hours is not that much of a time, after all, fortunately, our team was determined and hustling from the get-go. Fueled by the awesome energy and positivity spread by the great GDG Algiers community, and with much-needed coffee and snacks, we powered through the hackathon, adding the finishing touches till the last minute. The team was truly stellar and there’s no better feeling than knowing that their efforts were recognized by the judges.

Overall, DevFest is a great opportunity for everyone who wants to test their skills, make an impact, learn new things, and live some unforgettable moments.

We surely want to thank Younes for the warm words and his experience sharing.

The 2nd place went to ‘FanZ’, adding by that a second achievement to their well-deserved win in the LG track, and they also did not skimp us a word of appreciation:

Our solution, & through a camera integrated into the home LG TV allows recognizing a child who is actually viewing, and its input age with Al, and then via the LG ThinQ App it notifies the parent in case the content he is viewing is unfitting or harmful, In addition, the camera can detect if the kid is at a close distance from the TV screen; thing which might hurt his vision, and then blurs out the screen & displays through animations that he is from a close distance & should stand back to clear the screen again.

DevFest 21 was an opportunity that came after a long time of locking on on-site events, hence my team & I did not hesitate on taking this chance which fortunately was very rewarding, to speak about the vibes we lived on the 3 non-stop days….let’s just say it was fabulous, we worked really hard, stayed up 48 hours straight, drank too much coffee, but also had fun, we enjoyed the people around, listened to a lot of music, played games and took chance to network with very fun and interesting people, and well… had very good snacks lol.

All this experience was concluded by winning the LG Track and 2nd place in the competition, which made it all exceptional and memorable.

Of course, the hackathon would not in any case been as great if it wasn’t organized by such a great team, I take the chance to thank them again for the flawless work they’ve done to make that event come true, wishing to be part of a next GDG Algiers episode.

Said SeifAli Hafri from the FanZ team, so thanks to him and his team for taking part in our hackathon!

Last but not least, the one-of-a-kind team ‘Vagabonds’ saved the 3rd place with their remarkable solution, they all have accomplished what they worked hard for, and made an example of teamwork and dedication, we wish them all the best in their next adventure.

our sensational event ended with a grand celebration! Winning teams got their well-deserved prizes and cheers, and the good times were captured by cameras to make DevFest an everlasting memory.

Ada Lovelace challenge:

DevFest’21 came with many surprises and brand-new activities, among them was the competitive programming competition Ada Lovelace challenge, but why was it named Ada Lovelace? And what is this competition, exactly? Here comes the answers!

Since it was one of Women Techmakers Algiers’s contributions to this festival, choosing the name of the female mathematician whose known as the first programmer is meant to encourage women to participate and involve them more and more in tech, but of course, both genders could participate!

The concept of this competition was competitive programming which means finding solutions for given problems according to provided specifications within an amount of time which was in our case 6 hours neither more nor less. The main reason for having this activity was that the theme of the hackathon LiveAi was kind of advanced, and basically, a developer’s festival would aim to include programmers of all levels whether they were advanced or beginners, therefore a programming competition with challenges for all levels (easy — medium — hard) was no doubt the best solution, moreover, since it was fully online it gave a chance to those who wanted to join the event yet couldn’t make it to the hub, it was definitely a twofer!

The competition was held in HackerRank which is a platform where programmers from all over the world come together to solve problems in a wide range of Computer Science domains such as algorithms, machine learning, or artificial intelligence, as well as to practice different programming paradigms.

Throw the process of solving the challenges the participants had the chance to expand their knowledge by learning new programming techniques, consequently, it led them to strengthen their problem-solving skills, which is one of the main skills in a software engineer or a programmer, and as it’s said the best way to learn something is by doing it. Besides all the hard skills they get to enrich through the competition, participants tended to have fun and strengthen their teamwork, since after all, what’s more, exciting than solving challenging problems with your teammates?

But what’s actually more special about the Ada Lovelace competition is that it wasn’t only beneficial for the participants but for the team who worked on it as well. Cerine Bensadi, one of the organizers who contributed to the making of the competition enunciated that the making process was interestingly fun while working together and making sure to provide an activity with the best quality, they were inspired by already existing challenges yet made sure to make and mark their own version, the team contained GDG Algiers members from the development department and some other collaborators, Cerine also declared that the interaction between organizers and participants was great to throw communicating in the discord channel where they could ask questions and discuss any difficulties they faced.

Cerine concludes “It was a great experience working with the team on preparing the challenge and really refreshing to see the participants code and have fun and interact with them, It was something unique, and I am really grateful for it “

World-class level talks:

Talks were also in Rendez-vous! All related to the hackathon theme. Marvellous and skilful speakers enriched our minds with their experience and expertise in their respective fields. Hosting online talks besides the two competitions provided everlasting beneficial content for our audience.

After launching an online call for speakers, countless experts in their domain were eager to join the big festival, contributing to its success with topics that no one can easily find on the web pages or through small search but was the fruit of years of hard work and experience, providing by that a valuable material that you all still can check out on our Youtube channel

Topics varied from artificial intelligence and machine learning related topics such as Impactful AI, Auto ML, AI applications with Salesforce Einstein, Distributed machine learning and Reinforcement learning to development and software engineering such as Developer productivity engineering, DevOps at Netflix, Future of the web platform, all recorded and waiting for you to discover!

The Workshops track:

Our last track wasn’t any less special, we conducted five successful workshops varying from hard skills such as “Make machine learning in your browser with brain.js” by Anis Rouane and “Dive deep in flutter” with Djamel Rassem Lamouri, to soft skills counting a workshop about “how to navigate the ocean of UX/UI” with Asmaa Haidour and “Perform your competitive analysis” with Melissa Boutata, and we didn’t skimp the future generations of the beauty of AI so we provided a workshop for kids where we introduced them to the world of AI with Ayoub Farhi and “GDG Junior: Ai for Kids” workshop in collaboration with Snai3i, our participant had a tremendous benefit out of these training each in his topic, and left us eager to learn more and dive deeper into the enlightenment!

They made it happen:

A big event such as DevFest needs big sponsors as well, and fortunately, we were honored to collaborate and be supported by national and international companies who believed in our hard work and invested in our community, such as Instadeep a MENA leader in decision-making AI products for the Enterprise, Weight & Biases one of the leading companies in machine learning solutions, Gomycode one of the biggest tech community in Africa, DZhoster one of the best hosters in Algeria.

We were also delighted to announce that GitHub and LG Electronics trusted us and were sure that our festival will witness a brilliant success, Also thanks to the “VTCs” HEETCH and YASSIR support our participants could benefit from a 30% discount while joining the big day venue which took place in ALTIUS Services who also provided us with perfect space to hold a remarkable event. Without this huge support, DevFest’21 would never be as successful as it was, they really made it happen so again and honestly, we would like to express our sincere thankfulness and appreciation to our partners for helping the 10th edition be remarkable.

Our thanks and appreciation exceed the partners and sponsors to all the soldiers behind the scenes who made the edition as remarkable as it was, from our brilliant event manager “Sohaib Zouambia” to the previous season’s leads and Core team, arriving to all the organizer’s team, each contribution, well-done task, constructive feedback, supportive word and warm wish made it happen, you are the reason DevFest was a success so you definitely should be proud!

What’s next:

Arriving at the end of this article we all should be excited for what’s next, how can we beat the unbeatable? how to rise the bar higher than ever? well, this has never been impossible for GDG Algiers, our 11Th edition is in the process of completion so get ready to be amazed!