Wrapping up Devfest Lahore 2019

November 28, 2019

One of the things I enjoy other than writing code and talking about code, is to get others involved in it as well. This has been made possible by me and my friends’ efforts to build a supportive and inclusive community of young developers through the GDG program – revolving around great, open source technologies.

Since the inception of the GDG Lahore chapter back in 2012, we’ve organized over 50 events and 25 workshops; involving more than 15,000 community members along the way. And with the year ending, we just wrapped our flagship conference, Devfest Lahore 2019.

Like the previous Devfests, this year was no different – covering a wide range of topics from Web, Mobile, Cloud, AI and more. While we weren’t able to beat our previous record of 700 attendees, we still managed to accommodate 550+ students and professionals from various tech fields, both from Lahore and all over Pakistan.

We had two tracks comprising of 11 talks and 4 workshops, with speakers from Google, KeepTruckin, and top startups from Pakistan and across the Globe – and generous sponsors that included Slab, Careem (Uber), Google, Jetbrains, Dev.to, Swvl, Vivo, UXP and Pepsi.

Getting everything ready beforehand, and making sure the entire event such as this goes as smoothly as possible is no easy feat, but was made possible only because of the collective efforts of the whole team and the army of passionate volunteers. It’s no wonder that I slept and rested for a week before writing this.

It’s extremely humbling. Though at the same time, it sparks the drive to do even better next time. Here’s to hoping we can continue to build on and improve this amazing community of engineers, designers, entrepreneurs and more in the coming years.

Go here for more details about the conference, the sessions and follow-up links to slides, source code and other resources.

P.S. I was also able to squeeze in a talk about Self-healing applications in Kubernetes at the conference. Go check it out if you’re into K8S, DevOps or fault-tolerant systems in general.