I had attended the DevFest in 2019 before covid as an attendee, but this year, I got the opportunity to attend a DevFest at Delhi on December 3rd, as a Speaker. The venue for this year DevFest was Radisson Blu Plaza Delhi Airport. There was a huge turnout of developers and tech enthusiasts from all over Delhi NCR at this year DevFest. There were around 4545 registrations, 60+ speakers, 602 attendees and a strong team of 60 members volunteering for the DevFest.

What is DevFest?

DevFests are community-led developer events hosted by Google Developer Groups (GDG) around the globe annually. GDGs are focused on community building and learning about Google’s technologies which may cover multiple products such as Android, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform, Google Assistant, AI, Flutter, machine learning with TensorFlow and mobile web. Events may include speaker sessions, hackathons, codelabs, study jams and trainings with speakers from Tech companies.

DevFest Delhi

This year when the GDG Delhi called out for speakers, I applied for my talk on Pulumi — Code Centric Approach to IaC via Commudle link.

https://www.commudle.com/fill-form/1533

I thought that Pulumi would be an interesting topic to share about with vibrant community of DevFest Delhi developers. Pulumi is a universal infrastructure as code platform that allows you to use familiar programming languages and tools to build, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructure.

Pulumi is free, open source, and optionally pairs with the Pulumi Service to make managing infrastructure secure, reliable, and hassle-free. Pulumi is primarily targeted towards developers/programmers who are looking to leverage the programming languages they have been using to build applications, for IaC.

There were multiple tracks like Mobile, Web, ML/AI, Design, DevOps, Startups, and under each of those tracks, multiple speakers have been called out for their respective talks. My talk got selected under DevOps track and I felt extremely happy and satisfied with this news because I could not wait to see over +600 developers and students around Delhi/NCR. I always wanted to participate as one of the speakers on the event and this was my opurtunity to be sharing my knowledge with the community and giving back to the community from where I have got to learn a lot and has helped me in shaping my career for better.

I was able to generate good amount of interest in the vibrant developer community at GDG Delhi, to explore Pulumi and leverage it for IaC stuff at their respective projects. The talk was very well received and I got to connect with folks from the industry working either as developers or as Devops, as well as lot of engineering students around NCR, who were keen to learn more about Pulumi. There were some other good talks in the Devops track like Analysing MongoDB Altas Data in Google BigQuery and Optimizing Your Docker Builds for Production. I personally liked a talk on Self Healing systems from the director of MakeMyTrip, how they are leveraging StackStorm, a platform for integration and automation across services and tools at MakeMyTrip.

The DevFest Talks

The talks were taken mostly by the speakers working around the organizations in Delhi/NCR, who presented their unique insights on their topics of expertise. The event was structured to suit every individual that attended. Topics ranged from beginner level, intermediate and other topics were suitable for All individuals and I really thought that was cool.

The event ended with a closing remark from organizers and some feedback from the audience.

Slides presented at DevFest: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QRm5HZw45JteBUFJxZHxMeCSYRnmDW2Cn8J1rYhOLhw/edit#slide=id.g19a4f8f8f75_0_6

GitHub Repo(DevFest 2022):https://github.com/jasbir84/GDGDevFest2022-Delhi

GitHub Repo(Pulumi Examples for GCP): https://github.com/pulumi/examples/

Conclusion

I got the opportunity to network and finally see faces of people I usually see on linkedin, social media sites(Twitter/Facebook) and other developer platforms during the lunch break and the group photo session. I will encourage individuals in the tech community to come for such events because you get to learn a lot from the experts from the industry and its a good platform to network with like minded folks.

Sharing my picture from the event and also some of the cool schwags that I got as being one of the speakers on the event :)