New Heights with Devfest Lahore 2023

Humble Beginnings

An incredible journey of over 12 years has led to this moment!

When Haris, Abrar and I started GDG Lahore way back in 2012 as a small gathering of like-minded developers, I never imagined that we would end up being the largest community of developers — not just in Pakistan, but the entire South-Asian Frontier region.

DevFest is GDG Lahore’s flagship developers’ conference, signaling the end of the year for the community where we look at the current state of the art, and prepare for the upcoming technical advancements in web, mobile, cloud, AI and more.

As the largest gathering of Googlers, developer experts and software engineering industry leaders in Pakistan, delivering hardcore development sessions spread across 2 tracks; this year we saw unprecedented response in everything from the registrations, attendees, speakers, sessions, engagement, partners, and more — breaking all of our personal and external records in the region.

The Numbers

Here’s a quick recap of DevFest 2023:

• 2100+ attendees participated in the event, jumping in and out of various sessions across the 2 tracks

• 3000+ developer profiles were submitted, from all verticals of software development, highlighting both the breadth and depth of the experience of the attending developers

• 16 expert speakers delivered 10 talks and 4 workshops, with the content just as diverse as our audience

And with DevFest, the total number of events and workshops organized by GDG Lahore chapter since its inception has now exceeded 120, reaching a cumulative audience of over 22,000+ attendees across all events!

Incredible Teamwork

Of course, none of this was possible without the insane amount of effort put in by everyone from the team. Some colleagues I want to especially mention are: Mughees, Muaaz, Salman, Armghan, Saad and Shahzaib. Their hard work, dedication and drive was truly inspiring throughout the year.

Moreover, we were incredibly lucky this year to have the support of some amazing sponsors such as Google, OneByte, Systems Limited, Gaditek, JetBrains, Taleemabad, and UpAlerts.

To the Future

DevFest 2023 was a huge milestone for us, but there’s much we still need to accomplish. We’re still focused on our goal of empowering the emerging developer community in Pakistan and we have a long way to go.

So here’s to another 12 years of community building!