GDG DevFest Concludes at NED University, Karachi

Last weekend, on the 18th and 19th November the Google Developers Group Kolachi organized yet another successful event, this time it was the GDG DevFest held at the NED University of Engineering and Technology.

Google Developers Group is a community of dedicated and passionate individuals dedicated to develop and nurture the local ecosystem by organizing conferences, workshops and hackathons etc. With over 500 passionate attendees ranging from professionals to students, attended the 2-day event. This year’s enlightening tech-updating sessions were the least to say intriguing with ideas about prospective disruptive technological innovations and revolutions.

See also: Google officially announces Datally application for Pakistan in an event in Karachi

The 1st day was scheduled for speaker sessions alone, updating the ledgers of tech-fanatics on Google’s new products and technologies.

Speakers And Topics

• Sami Kizilbash (Developer Relations, Google) – What’s new on Google Developers Tools
• Eric Bhatti (Community Manager, GDG Kolachi) – Community Announcements
• Hussain Mehmoood (Analytics Consultant, MarketLytics) – Automating the world one script at a time
• Mashhood Rastgar (Technical Lead, Recurship) – PWAs: Web finally takes over
• Ali Raza (CEO, Datalysis) – TensorFlow 101
• Atif Azim (CEO, VentureDive) – What does it take to be world class?
• Sana Zehra (Sr. Software Engineer, TPS) – Cloud Store vs Firebase Database
• Muhammad Ali (Solutions Architect, VentureDive) – Android Architecture Components
• Raza Matin (Business and Marketing Consultant, Google) – The role of failure in innovation
• Zafar Saeed (Sr. Software Developer, 10Pearls) & Muhammad Siddiqui (Software Developer, 10Pearls) – Enhancing UX with Angular
• Shahzad Badar (Managing Architect, Primatics Financial) – Taking the assistant to the cloud
• Hasib Malik (Consultant, Fluxx Ltd. London) – Pakistan: The last digital frontier

The Festival kicked off with a warm Oreo breakfast party with shakes and coffee, dedicated to the Android 8.0 update. Sami Kizilbash started off by welcoming the participants and presenting the Keynote, sharing the latest developer tools from TensorFlow and the Google Cloud Platform to Udacity Scholarships and much more that the Google stack has to offer, motivating the attendees to make the best use of these latest technologies.

Eric Bhatti, talked about how far GDG Kolachi has come in the past year, and there’s a long way to go. He also urged the community to become an early adapters community, by trying out the latest tech as soon as it is released.

Hussain Mehmood, emphasized on the integration of GSuite and providing automation for convenience via Google APIs. Mashhood Rastgar introduced Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and contrasted it with the standard mobile app by providing examples like Twitter Lite and more.

Ali Raza explained the prospects that TensorFlow, an open source software library, brings forth for innovation for machine learning using neural networks, he also conducted a basic demo during his talk.

Atif Azim, the CEO of VentureDive, discussed “What does it take to be world-class?”. Starting off with attributes of a world-class team, he stressed on discipline, focus and action and most importantly on their “level of khabt”. He said it’s the innovator’s relentless drive that helps them to make it through all the nays and negativity surrounding them.

Sana Zahra spoke about how real-time databases can come in handy for data management. Muhammad Ali discussed the 4 major Architectural components to focus on for making Android applications.

Raza Matin, the Marketing and Business Consultant for Google, delivered the concept of “10X or Moonshot Thinking” with utmost perfection. His words were like melody for all failures. He too urged Think Big ideology, according to him, “If you wake up each day while doing a project and the mere idea of it doesn’t scare and excite you at the same time, you are not thinking big enough.”, motivating attendees to “Let the crazy blossom” and “Shoot to the Moon”.

The 10Pearls team rejuvenated the crowd with their talk on how user experience is revolutionizing with Angular’s front end engaging features. Shahzad Badar taught basics of using Dialogflow to create our personal google assistant. His talk included a demonstration of creating a google assistant that is hooked with the cloud.

Hasib Malik shed light on facts and figures regarding the opportunities in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and how it’s flourishing in Pakistan by leaps and bounds. He highlighted that Pakistan has loads to learn from countries with whom we share economic and social backgrounds and study not just their successes but their failures too. He also highlighted the over or undervaluation of startups and how such mishaps have resulted in founder crisis in the region. Encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation, he emphasized how much the power of empathy and gender equality is important for sustainable growth and impactful results.

The second day was a Hackathon, where participants were to come up with a fast, secure, and innovative methods to improve authentication and the customer onboarding process. Among quite a few projects and impressive ideas, the most unique of them all was of creating a user profile and making it unique via their keyboard swipe behavior won the competition.