DevFestW Campinas

[Michael Bakaimani]

i got this and i thought of sharing.

Hi,

Some of you may have heard about São Paulo, the biggest city in Brazil. I live in Campinas, 100 km (approx 62 mi) away from São Paulo.

I just arrived home after DevFestW Campinas. We had to postpone it to today (April 10th) because we had some problems with location. 

We planned a small event, we had 24 spots and I expected two hours. I don't know about other countries, but here we had at least half of the registered attendees being absent, so I confirmed all the 48 registered. Unfortunately, we had only 10 attendees, but with the other speakers watching, we got a small classroom filled (it was in a training school). If it were 24, we'd put 14 in one room and 10 in another, running two talks in parallel. We planned two hours (with coffee-break), but due to lack of people, we ran the talks serially, so it became a 3½ hours event.

There were 6 speakers (women). We had (in order) one talk about web development (JavaScript), delivered by Daniele Ferras, and one about Google Spreadsheet API, by Evellyn Almeida; she told us how her team integrated a system with Google Spreadsheets so the customer, a brazilian bank, could see in Google Spreadsheets all the data they needed. Very nice talk. These were short talks, 15 minutes each. Then a longer talk, by Viviane Delvequio, 30 minutes, although we violated the limit because it was fun to talk about. This one was about UX in the process of software development. The speaker told us about UX in general, then showed us a use case from an Android app she developed. 

Coffee-break follows with lots of interactions. I talked with a guy from SouJava Campinas (lit.: I'm Java, a local JUG) who helped us to market the event, but I haven't met in person yet, and three guys starting a new GDG (they already applied to create GDG Indaiatuba, one city near here). 

After coffee-break, we had two Android talks, one introduction delivered by two speakers, Julia Perdigueiro and Natalia Franchi, followed by one about NFC and Android, by Suelen Silva. This was the most technically heavy talk, but contrary of what I expected, people understood and participated a lot.

There was no boring talk, I really appreciated all 5 talks. 

We gave some swag, like Android backpacks and GDG shirts (for giveaway), and one shirt I got from GDG BH (Belo Horizonte is the capital city of the state of Minas Gerais, where I was born and lived exactly two thirds of my life).

The good side of having approximately 15 people watching is the interaction. We put aside time limit on purpose, so we could talk and interact all the time. People raised questions all the time, we interacted a lot.

We took lots of photos and we recorded all talks, I'll post an update when I put them live. Most of them are in my friend's camera, and he just moved to a new apartment and doesn't have internet connection yet, so I need to meet him in person to get the files. To make it worse (for me), next week he goes on vacation and will travel for two weeks. I'll try to meet him tomorrow to get the files.

Cheers,

--

Douglas Drumond
http://drumond19.com

--
Michael Bakaimani
P.O. Box 1571
Lilongwe, Malawi

265-888-544638 or 265-999-779495

skype: michael.bakaimani
facebook :: www.facebook.com/michael.bakaimani