On 24th September, tuesday evening when i received call from Prashant Reddy, founder of StudyOwl and Developer Weekend, asking whether it would be possible for me to host a workshop on Dialogflow at the 2019 edition of Developer Weekend happening on 28th and 29th, i was both amazed and excited. Without wasting another minute, booked the next ticket to Bangalore, Reva University.
Reva university situated in a calm and pleasant area, away from all the noise and traffic of Bangalore city, was crowded that saturday with students and professionals from various institues and companies respectively. No surprise there, as all the speakers for the event were techno-hulks.
The day was kickstarted by an electrifying keynote talk from Anuj Duggal. What followed was nothing short of a magical journey. Avirup Basu’s talk on 'Being SMART' really geared my eyes towards converting my car into an AMAZO. Dushyantsinh Jadeja graced the stage next with his fun filled way of looking at ML and working with kaggle datasets. What came up next was NOT a yet-another-talk on Alexa. Karthik Ragubathy really laid out all the hardware and software nitty-gritties of using alexa, all in laymans' terms.
The next couple of hours, we were transported from the 'Real' reality to Augmented, Virtual and Mixed realities. Thanks to Madhav M Nair and Abhiram, we had a thrilling and fun filled journey into the VR world. What followed was an entirely new experience to me. Abhilash’s demo on Hololens and mixed reality was both a captivating and a mesmerizing experience.
After all these info-fun-packed sessions, Suma Sundararajan brought in a change of air by emphasizing the power of each and every single individual in designing their own future and of those around them.
Grooving back to techno talks, Harshit gave us an idea on what exactly do PWAs mean and how the thinking patterns be while developing mobile apps. What came up next was a talk on something which i am personally interested about: Startups. Ashwini S touchbased on the crucial factors to consider while building up a startup.
Day 1 saw a fantastic conclusion by a talk on open source by Sayantika Banik. She stressed how each and every developer, be it a novice or a pro, can contribute to open source community.
The excitement did not stop there. I have always been afraid to dabble with AR as i was convinced it was too "heavy" a technology for a beginner to pick up. Day 2 started off with Ojasvi Bhatia’s talk on Spark AR. He inspired us how even a non technical person can make a entry into the AR world using Spark AR.
No developer weekend is complete without a session on Cloud. Nikhil Raichur, taught us the importance of adopting cloud technologies and how one can build credentials in using Google Cloud.
Day 2 talks were concluded by Teja Chintalapati’s introductory talk and demo on OpenThread. OpenThread was a completely new topic to me but the talk and demo helped me quickly get a grip on what it is all about.
The rest of the day comprised of multiple workshops on different technologies happening parallelly. I am extremely happy that i could host a workshop on Dialogflow.
Special mention to all the volunteers who worked tirelessly day and night over the weekend to make the event extraordinary. The hospitality and patience shown by the volunteers requires special commendation.
Thank you Prashant, for giving me such a great opportunity.