International Women’s Day Mega Meetup: Representing Mozilla Delhi
Hello Everyone!
I’m finally here with my first blog post and I’m so excited to be sharing it with you all. :-)
On 10th March, I got the opportunity to attend International Women’s Week Mega Meetup at Adobe, Noida and here I am penning down my experience about the same.
The meetup was one of the biggest collaborative meetup by seven active communities in Delhi, such as Women Techmakers, Women Who Code Delhi, etc. which teamed up to celebrate women in tech on the occasion of International Women’s Day!
I would first like to brief about my meetup journey to quickly share my learnings so far. The first technical meetup I attended was with GDG New Delhi, back in December 2017. I just showed up over there, as topics were of my interest and really got excited by the concept of such technical communities existing around. I had been to 2–3 such meetups afterward, there as an attendee. Along my way, I learned that these meetups are a perfect place to discover new opportunities and improve your technical knowledge and skills. Also, you get to meet great developers here and find that they’re actually friendly and approachable. Moreover, there is no other safe and more welcoming place than these meetups, to help you expand your social skills.
Coming back to this wonderful Mega Meetup, this was my very first time coming to any meetup as a volunteer. I represented Mozilla Delhi, one of the organizing communities of this meetup. And yes, I got the opportunity to give a talk, on such a big platform by Adobe with so many attendees, for the first time! I will share my experience on this part, in a later section of this blog post. :)
The day was witnessed by 150+ attendees and was open for all with more preference to female attendees while rolling out the invites. The meetup included 3 talks of 40 minutes each and yes, each of them was accompanied by loads of food by Adobe. ❤
The first talk was by Neha Sharma, founder of JS lovers Community, and having 8 years of experience in the web development field. Her talk was about curious cases of Javascript and later, she also talked about her community, JS-lovers at the end. I attended her first session in GDG, New Delhi meetup, and from that day, she became a source of inspiration for me, being such a wonderful lady in the tech field. So, a big thanks to organizers for inviting her as one of the speakers.
The second talk was by Tannu Bansal, director of Codeblocks Technologies, and an AWS consultant. She enlightened us with AWS dynamoDB managed services, where I got to learn about a new type of NoSQL database service, DynamoDB offered by Amazon services. The last talk was on “Infusing AI into your solutions” by Ruhani Arora, a technology evangelist at Microsoft India, with a keen interest in ML and Blockchain.
This was then followed by lightning talks. Attendees were supposed to submit their proposals on the spot, and organizers shortlisted 10 out of them to be presented on stage. Each lightning talk could not exceed the time limit of 5 minutes, and was on diverse topics from ML to IoT, to open source, where developers came up, showcased and explained their project or anything they did in the tech field, of course.
I found that these lightning talks are a great opportunity to showcase something you built, to the attendees. Even if you are not a speaker for the day, you still get the opportunity to present your work and expand your public speaking skills.
The closing ceremony was done by all the organizing communities of this meetup. Here, 1 or 2 representatives from each of them were to give a community talk, explaining about their initiative, how they are helping out their members, their activities so far, and how the other attendees can volunteer or get involved with their community. Being a part of Mozilla Delhi, I got an opportunity to represent it and give the talk. Thanks to Shashank Kumar, one of the organizers of the community for this! :)
This was my first talk ever and that too in such a big meetup with so many attendees present. So I felt a little bit nervous at first. But I could eventually overcome it and helped out my friend Avishi, co-representing Mozilla Delhi with me, being struck with the same situation. Needless to say, it all went very well, and here is what I learned. Although I shared the stage for a few minutes the experience was enthralling. I could finally put out my first step towards expanding my public speaking skills and that too on such a wonderful occasion of Women’s Day at Adobe.
I had an amazing time here, got to learn from each and every part of this meetup, met some wonderful people over here and yes, a room full of techie females was the BEST part! A big shout out to organizers for such wonderful arrangements!
I would definitely attend more such meetups and conferences in the future. :)
A montage from Adobe for this Mega Meetup can be found here.
Till then, keep learning and coding!
