What words come to our minds when we are talking about DevFest? 🧐 Technologies, innovation, tech talks, workshops, communication, opportunity, community, and probably many positive words bring to mind.
🚀 DevFest is a truly unique event carried out on a global scale. It’s a technology celebration day that developers are looking forward to from year to year.
Devfest Georgia 2021 was a small part of this great series but it was of great significance for our local community. Here’s a summery of the event:
🔹 7 days
🔹 13 sessions
🔹 1 Coding competition — CodeFest
🔹 17 Speakers
🔹 Over 500 participants
🔹 Up to 50 participants in the coding competition
🔹 6 partners
Let’s go to the Devfest Georgia 2021’s backstage and see what actions we needed to take during 2-month organization process. 👀
Let’s follow the sequence. If you have read my old blogs, you will know that I became familiar with the tech field, Google Dev Communities, and their events in 2019. I remember how GDG Tbilisi was preparing for the amazing DevFest and how community members were looking forward to this day. Unfortunately, I could not attend DevFest Tbilisi. I was astonished by the recordings and the main video. It was a truly great event! 💥
A pandemic started in 2020, and DevFest was not held in Georgia. I was already a member of the GDG community though a novice. I wanted to attend other community events first, but it was not possible due to the pandemic.
In 2021, I thought I would not let a pandemic cancel this big event again. The previous events showed that collaboration is a very effective way to organize great events, so I decided to contact the members of the different Google Dev Communities in Georgia. It would also be a great experience for GDSC leaders who joined the program just a few months ago.
Finally, we joined forces and started working on DevFest Georgia 2021. 🦾
The planning process was standard:
📌 Brainstorming;
📌 Creating the plan;
📌 Distribution of tasks by deadlines;
📌 Weekly meetings for updates;
📌 Office hours with Googlers;
📌 Getting advice from experienced DevFest organizers;
Indeed, all the big events have their difficulties. DevFest is a popular, and important event for Tech Community. Honestly, in the beginning, my enthusiasm grew into fear. I was afraid our event would not be as successful as the previous editions. For the first time, we had to host the event online. Because online sessions make people very tired, we faced a big dilemma when we had to decide on the duration of the event: 1–2 days or 1 week. 📅
We still took that risk and hosted several sessions during the weekdays, while we had a much busier schedule on the weekends. The unusual 1-week schedule and the fully online event turned out to be very stressful.
😇 But did you know that the Georgian national motto is “Strength is in Unity”? and because DevFest Georgia 2021 had an enthusiastic, hardworking, and great team, I felt there was nothing to worry about.
👥 As well as the preparation period, we redistributed the events. Each event had at least 2 co-organizers (if one of the hosts went out due to an internet connection, the other would take over).
Sometimes, planning DevFest and other big events is much more time-consuming than any Full-time job. But we had always been able to maintain balance by redistributing responsibilities. 😎
🤩 In the end, all the speakers and participants were pleased with the event.
During the sessions, our partner Smart Academy granted 3 free coursed to the most active participants. One of them also received a job offer. 🥳
We had 3 winners in the coding competition who received gifts from our partners:
1️⃣ The first-place winner was awarded Smart Ring by Cnick.
2️⃣ The second-place winner received a Raspberry Pi 3 from UG-Limes Academy.
3️⃣ The third-place winner received Google Home Mini by Smart Web.
All winners received vouchers from Collider — Coworking space.
In addition, 2 selected participants were offered an internship program by our partner Exadel. One of them has already started.
2 more selected participants were allowed to take a free course at their academy by UG-Limes.
🎥 The event was also a great experience for the organizers. In this video, you can listen to our organizers, speakers, partners, and participants talk about their DevFest adventure:
😂 We also had a lot of funny situations at DevFest. This is my favorite one:
In one of the sessions, the participant entered with the name “Sundar Pichai”.
Then we laughed a lot at that fact and I thought, would ever Google CEO really come to my planned event 💭 (directly added to my GREAT DREAM’S LIST😁)
🤔 Do you want to listen to DevFest recordings? You can watch the records on this link | The note 👉 not all sessions were recorded due to the speaker’s choice.
🔥 And if you want to meet some organizers from our super team, here we are with the winners of CodeFest:
