Event: GDG DevFest 2014 on October 26th, 2014 in Düsseldorf.

The GDG DevFest 2014 organized by the great GDG developer community living in and around Düsseldorf.

Everyone volunteered to help to organize this event. Lots of previous spare-time was donated by the GDG Düsseldorf group members.

GDG Düsseldorf on Google+

Event Facts

Noting a couple of facts from the event. This list is incomplete. Refer to the links for complete list of people and details on the presentations.

Who are the people who helped organize the event?

Randy, Jens, Resul, Dittmar, Alex and many more.

See full list of speakers and the team.

Where was it?

Coworking space “GarageBilk” in Bilk, Düsseldorf.

Who were the sponsors?

Google GDG and GrandCentrix.de

What were the topics discussed?

See the GDG DevFest 2014 website for the list of speakers and presentations.

Links to the presentations

Here are some of the presentations shared with the attendees at the event:

• Maxim Mai - “App and Game Revenue Models”
• Dittmar Steiner - “Golang”
• Dittmar Steiner - “Micro Services”
• Dittmar Steiner - “Docker”
• Pascal Welsch - “Material Design”
• Nabil Ben Said - “Android TV”
• Frederik Schweiger - “Building Apps For Wearables”
• Nenad Natošević - “Gradle” Workshop
• Randy Nel Gupta - “Polymer”

How was the venue?

The GarageBilk co-working space is a remodelled, cleaned-up garage and gas station. Lots of local small businesses and startups have their offices there. The GDG Düsseldorf got the whole location rented out for the full Sunday for this special occasion. There were three rooms: one big area, the smaller loungs area and a workshop meeting room.

How was the food?

The catering was fantastic with a nice assortment of delicious quiche, fresh fruit, refreshments, Rezul’s family contributed with authentic Turkish rolls, etc. Drinks (fresh and coffee) was sponsored by Nana Lohmanns and Randy Gupta.

Where did we do promotion and how did attendees register?

At first there was only the Google+ event, since the event was free of charge. Later an EventBrite event was created to improve the registration process to know better how many attendees would actually show up.

Alex Hepting did the graphic design for the name tags and he also created a nice coffee mug bearing the names of the team members.

About the website

To create the event website the source code was organized on GitHub and was build using a Jekyll template, made by the Ukraine GDG chapter.

How was it organized?

The team used Google+, Trello, gitHub to coordinate preparing the website and everything from catering to sound tech and organizing the presentations.

At first the tasks and todos were shared with the group within the team using Google Hangouts. Soon Jens and Johan set up a Github repository to work on the website and GDG websites. Thanks to gitHub, collaborating was painless and smooth. Later Randy set up a Trello board to coordinate tasks needed to be taken care of before, during and after the event.