devfest Sri Lanka 2022 was the third tech event of renowned tech organizations, I got the opportunity to attend(After the Microsoft ignite after party and the GitHub universe watch party) during a span of a month or so. Of these three, devfest was the massive one, as it hosted close to 1600+ participants if I am not mistaken. If you are wondering what exactly is devfest, it is a global community-driven tech conference, hosted by the Google Developer Groups(GDG) Community. Each devfest event is crafted by its GDG organizers to fit the learning needs and interests of their local developer community, with a strong focus on knowledge exchange, networking and learning about Google developer technologies.

Now let me tell you what devfest 2022 — Sri Lanka held in the box. It was a two-day event organized by GDG Sri Lanka(Google Developer Group), GDG Cloud Sri Lanka and Women Tech Makers Sri Lanka: Day 1 comprised code lab sessions on Flutter, Machine Learning, Cloud, Women Tech Makers, Web & Firebase out of which participants had to choose their preferred track when applying, and Day 2 comprised the main conference. Out of all the fascinating tracks for Day 1, I opted for Machine Learning and was fortunate to be selected for the session. (Not everyone was selected for participation on both days).

Day 1:

Day 1 was all about practical coding sessions. The first session was on “AI with Tensorflow” by Aqsa Kausar, Head of AI at Red Buffer. She started by giving a basic understanding of Machine Learning along with an overview of the concepts of Artificial intelligence, deep learning, algorithms and computer vision which is understanding images using machine learning. Towards the end of the session, we had a hands-on practical on google colab, which was to train a model to recognize humans and horses.

The next session was “Training neural networks with Tenserflow” by Thirunayan Dinesh, Data scientist and Team Lead at Rootcode AI. He covered the essence of neural networks alongside a practical walkthrough on building an end-to-end neural network pipeline through Tensorflow.

The final session was on “Getting started with Google Vertex AI” by Suresh Peiris who is a Co-founder of Inforwaves(Pvt) Ltd and one of the organizers of the event from the Google Developers Group Sri Lanka. With that, the event concluded and we were sent off with refreshments just the way we were welcomed with. But what the welcome had, in addition, which is ubiquitous in all tech events, was Swags!

“Wish I could have participated in other tracks as well” — That’s what I thought afterwards. Here are a few snaps of sessions in other tracks that happened parallelly.

In a nutshell, The sessions of Day 1 ignited my curiosity and passion towards machine learning further. I got to know about various concepts and tools in Google related to machine learning.

Day 2: The Main Conference

Day 2 had a disappointing start for me, in terms of swags. Got the same devfest sticker. I expected Day 2 to have more swags than Day 1 as it is the main conference where everyone’s gonna assemble at one place rather than participating in different tracks. There’s a popular saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, and that’s what it was afterwards. From the keynote speeches to entertainment events to refreshments everything was top-notch. The flamboyant Event-Intro at the beginning, which was highly praised by the participants, set the tone for this wonderful event. Click here to view the event intro.

The event started with the Keynote by Rohan Jayaweera, Co-founder of Antyra Solutions and a former county Consultant at Google. His enthusiasm towards Artificial intelligence, Data science and passion about the technology for the transformation of businesses reflected on his speech on the topic “ Evolution of future”.

What followed was a demonstration themed “Take your Flutter app from boring to beautiful” by Abu Anwar AD Abdullah who is a Google Developer Expert on Flutter and Dart and runs a YouTube channel to share his knowledge. He explained how experts apply simple, straightforward, incremental techniques to take a well-built but boring-looking app and turn it into something memorable.

Just when the brain started to yawn, a side-splitting entertainment was provided in the form of a dev-related skit (a comedy-drama) by Cocktail Productions. It was a conversation between a software developer and a female social media influencer. The whole auditorium was immersed in fits of laughter and joy. Click here to view the show.

Then, Sajeetharan Sinnathurai who is the first Google Developer Expert in web Technology from Sri Lanka gave a speech about new features of Angular and Standalone components. His stack overflow profile really amazed me and I decided for myself that I should achieve something similar. How do you achieve it? By proper learning! What do you mean by proper learning? Ask questions if you don’t know something and share your knowledge if you know. And that’s it!

The next event in the agenda was a speech on “Creative Disruption in FinTech from Sri Lanka” by Sampath Tilakumara, Head of Technology — LSEG Sri Lanka which is a market leader in FinTech. After his informative talk, winners of the hackathon conducted by LSEG leading to devfest, were rewarded with Ipads and MacBooks which I dream of achieving one day, not by purchasing one but by winning a hackathon.

By this time we were really exhausted and delicious Dominos Pizzas came to our rescue. While enjoying the meal, I got to network with new people and met friends who I got to know through LinkedIn .I also attended the stall put up by LSEG(London Stock Exchange Groups), the Platinum sponsor of the event and clarified the doubts I had regarding the industry. They gave a nice black steel bottle as well.

The next event in the agenda was again by Aqsa Kasuar on “Deep dive into AI ‘’. It was a dive into how AI works intuitively especially in CNNs followed by how CNNs have progressed and marked some groundbreaking advancements. After the meal, the afternoon slump hit but the organizers had answers for that too. The stage was given to the exuberant Blaze Beatbox team to energize the audience but they went ahead and conquered the whole auditorium. The participants sang, danced along with and we were overjoyed. Kudos to the speakers and organizers of the event on delivering interesting sessions and planning an agenda with sufficient entertainment and loosening. The energy after the musical event was so high that even if there were ten more sessions, it’s still digestible. Prior to the event, I wondered how to listen to this many sessions but the planning of the agenda was top-notch.

The next session was by Mr. Pasindu de Silva, who gave a speech on building software at Google and the ecosystem of Google. It was really fascinating to hear how things are done at a tech giant company of Google’s calibre.

As the final session for the day, Charith De Silva, Chief Architect at Fortude, gave an informative talk on the new breed of ‘Watchmen’: Autoimmune bots. Then a group photo of the participants was taken, not sure if you could find me as it was a really huge crowd. The fact — this being just the shortlisted participants and a similar count being rejected shows how passionate Sri Lankan youth is towards technology. After the session, a Group photo of all the participants, speakers and organizers was taken.

It was inspiring to listen to the stories of the speakers on how they climbed up the ladder from being a newbie like me to the event, unidentified in a vast crowd but fascinated and motivated to reach greater heights, to becoming a speaker in such a magnificent event.

Then we had to queue up, in fact, crowd up to collect our delegate t-shirt. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, to be honest, but thanks to Sri Lankan politicians, we were used to it (queueing up for fuel, medicine, and daily essentials). In a country where we had to wait for days for fuel, is this even a queue?

Massive shout-out to every soul involved in organizing an event of this scale and to the participants, speakers and everyone for making it an enormous success. Winding up the blog, looking forward to devfest ‘23.