GDG Cloud New Delhi: A Year in Review

Tl;dr — Over the last two years, the community has touched the following numbers:

• Offline events — 20
• Online Events — 6
• Meetup members — 5304
• Commudle members — 6068
• LinkedIn followers — 6529
• Twitter followers — 1524
• Facebook followers — 944
• YouTube subscribers — 122
• Medium followers — 22

Before I begin, let's take a look back over our birthday celebrations last year. We had a great deal of fun with the ideathon and the cake cutting. The food wasn’t the regular pizzas; we served samosas and sandwiches instead. I think there were Nachos and coke as well ;). Last time’s celebrations are an exemplary example that ours is a fast learning community. 80 people, most of which who’ve never heard what AMP was, built apps using the AMP Stories. We showcased one of a kind CI/CD pipeline using products such as Cloud Run and Cloud Build that were recently launched back then and were in beta at the time of our setup. If you want to build a similar pipeline, we wrote a fine blog that can be found here. The blog also talks about what the event was like and takes us through how the journey panned out.

Looking at those pictures, and the ideas that were presented at that event, fills my heart with warmth as if I would love to relive those moments again.

And our attendees remember it too …

While certainly, in such times of a global health crisis, we can’t do a similar event, we can definitely take a look back and relish the pictures here and the ideas at the GitHub repo here. Doesn’t the repo look just finely maintained with all the submission placed at one place with the Run on Google Cloud button? Well, all credit to our GitHub Captain Yash Handa who manages our open-source program and some open-source contributions from James Ward. This article is also in line with our Medium writers program. Both of these programs were launched at our last anniversary and are still very actively looking for contributors.

We’ve come a long way since then. I would have written words but there’s too much to it, therefore, let’s look at some of the statistics.

• Offline Events — 7
• Online Events — 6
• Community reach increase in number (Meetup) — 2100
• Community reach increase in percentage (Meetup) — 65.625%
• Community reach increase in number (Commudle) — 4920
• Community reach by percentage (Commudle)— 430%
• LinkedIn followers increase in number — 6076
• LinkedIn Followers increase by percentage— 1426%
• Twitter followers increase in number — 1135
• Twitter followers increased by percentage — 293%
• Facebook followers increase in number — 442
• Facebook followers increased by percentage— 88.04%
• YouTube Subscribers gained — 122
• Medium followers — 22

Now that’s something! It’s astonishing how the community has grown. Did you notice that YouTube and online events are new here? Well, that’s where we are today. We started two new series, Coffee on Cloud and Community Connect. While Coffee on Cloud is our attempt at democratising Google Cloud, the Community Connect on the other hand is series where we talk to various people, influencers and leaders in the community. This was only made possible by Vaibhav Srivastav, our newest member on the team who’s our in-house expert on all things data with years for professional experience in building smart solutions for enterprises. Speaking of team, we’re looking for a female organizer with professional experience and ML chops.

We hit the prestigious 5000 member mark on Meetup. I personally believe that I have grown way more than I expected in span of a year. The community has been endearing and welcoming to all, regardless of their experience or age. It’s not just me, the community has grown too and the testimonials say that.

Last year we also had a grand DevFest and the stories were all over the place with more than 100 attendees in the Cloud track alone. We had 18 community collaborations along with 17 DSC collaboration. The event was such grand that the stories echoed until days after. We also celebrated our first Google Cloud Community Day, our first dedicated event to cloud computing at scale. With speakers from over 5 countries, the event featured topics ranging from serverless, data analytics, machine learning and infrastructure modernization. No wonder it was another success.

Here’s to another year of learning, sharing and caring. I look forward to meeting you all again in person next year as we would celebrate in another day of fun and smiles. Until then, I hope everyone stays healthy and safe.

Pranay
Organiser, GDG Cloud New Delhi