DevConf is an annual Developers’ Conference and it was organised at such a big scale in India for the first time. It was conducted on 4-5 Aug, 2018 at Christ University, Bangalore. There were over 1100 attendees and 110 speakers at the conference, the conference was indeed a success!
Day 0:
I was travelling to Bangalore after four years, the last time I was around was at PyCon India, 2014 and now again for DevConf.IN, 2018. I landed at the Bangalore Airport at noon and to the surprise was the Airport pickup arranged by DevConf organisers for all the female speakers. It felt nice to skip the hassle of finding your way to the hotel, the cab driver knew it all ;). The weather was nice but the traffic was not, it took me more than 2 hours to reach the hotel but was a comfortable ride though.
It was good to see a lot of known faces at the hotel as all the speakers were putting up at the same place. So, my room had a nice view of the traffic and I did enjoy that view sitting by the window with a cup of coffee and making last minute changes to my slides.
Now comes one of the interesting moments of Day 0 at the conference :D. All the speakers were supposed to collect the speaker badges, tshirts and wifi password from one of the volunteer’s room which was located on the 10th floor. Now that all the speakers were walking to that room there had to be some noise and someone from the next room complained at the reception about the disturbance. It was I and a few other folks around when that person walked out of his room wearing dark shades at 10:30 in the night (I really controlled hard to not laugh out loud at that time) and started shouting on the hotel staff asking them to call the GM of the hotel because he mentioned he was some big shot and won’t talk to people there :D. After a slight argument, the volunteer said sorry just to settle it down and get everything going again in a silent way 😉 . We still don’t know who he was, but his behaviour was very egotistical.
Everyone crashed early to bed so as to be at the hotel lobby at 7:00 am just to catch the bus to the venue well in time and avoid heavy traffic.
Day 1:
Everyone gathered at the hotel lobby for breakfast well in time and the buses were on time too. We all hopped onto the bus and reached the venue by 8:15/30 am. Everything was set, right from the entrance, banners/ flex boards, to the registration desks, to the conference rooms.. it looked like the Organisers had done an amazing job in getting everything flawlessly done.
The conference began with a keynote by Ric Wheeler where he shared his life experiences with open source and how Open Source is better for companies/businesses, communities and developers. Right after the keynote was my talk in the QE track. So, I rushed to the next block just to be there in time for my talk. My talk was on ‘Protractor 101s: Quick and Easy‘, where I talked about getting started with Protractor and covered some important concepts like Promises and Control Flow. The talk went well so I was happy at the end of it. 😉 You can find the slides here. Unfortunately, my talk was not recorded as the designated person reached the QE track in the last 10-12 minutes. I attended another talk in the same room on ‘Robot Framework’ and then went to checkout all the booths. Spent some time at the booths networking and catching up with some known faces at the booths. There was sponsored lunch for volunteers and speakers in the basement cafeteria of the main block which nevertheless had a very long waiting queue but it seems everyone got food at the end of it.
Post lunch I walked into the workshop ‘Hands-on Javascript and React‘ which was a full-house and being successfully run by Pooja Rani and Anuj Singla. After attending some of it, I walked into the talk titled ‘Gitcoin – Intersection of Blockchain & OSS‘, which brought to my knowledge that there was a platform which incentivised open source contributions in the form of bounties using blockchains. Though I did not explore anything after that talk but still was a good to know. After that we had a bunch of lightning talks and a closing keynote by Karanbir Singh which was a treat to listen to. There wasn’t any social evening planned, so we headed back to the hotel and everyone had their own plans to spend the evening. 😉
Day 2:
The day started with the opening keynote by Christian Heimes. I didn’t really attend many talks on Day 2 but was spending time around the booth area meeting people. Post lunch, I attended one of the talks on ‘Understanding Hardware Vulnerabilities‘ by Siddhesh Poyarekar which was insightful enough, you may want to watch the recording once uploaded. I attended the last one for the day in the ‘Campus View’ titled ‘ Evolving IT Infrastructure for Agility‘ and then it was time for lightening talks. I also gave a lightening talk on some of the common thoughts on testing such as Manual vs Automation, Test Coverage/100% automation, etc. just to highlight the fact Quality Engineering is an important aspect of SDLC.
Then was the Vote of Thanks by Rupali where she went a bit emotional talking about the entire effort put behind putting the show together, but that was indeed a worth it thing to be done! It was an excellent show and kudos to everyone. 🙂
Looking forward to next year! Cheers!
Sharing a few more clicks:
Cheers! See ya DevConf.IN next year!
Anisha Narang 
That’s good writing. Nicely captured. Especially, I could imagine “Dark Shades in Night”. But hey this is Bangalore with many thinking they’re in the valley and they are just Mark Zuckerberg.