Data, DevRel, and Bangalore: 48 Hours in India’s Tech Capital

I recently embarked on a two-day trip to Bangalore, India, where I had the opportunity to speak at several data events.

In this post, I'll share invaluable lessons and insights from the experiences I had in India. These reflections aim to guide and inspire fellow DevRel professionals in planning their own Indian adventures. Join me as I recount the highlights, challenges, and unforgettable moments from my recent trip to the heart of India's tech hub.

Day 1: Flight delays, domestic Indian air travel, and arrival in Bangalore

I was supposed to fly to Bangalore from Manchester, UK via Doha. However, my outbound flight from Manchester was delayed by two hours without explanation, causing me to miss my connection from Doha to Bangalore. So, the airline put me on a flight to Mumbai first, causing me to take a domestic flight to Bangalore from there.

That two-hour flight delay put me through the additional burden of clearing immigration in Mumbai, collecting my luggage, and carrying it on several floors to finally recheck it with my domestic flight to Bangalore. However, the Mumbai airport staff was super helpful and supportive with clear instructions. Despite the early hour—around 3 AM—I noticed several queues at the check-in counters and the security. But they were moving fast.

Finally, I boarded my last flight. It was an Air India flight from Mumbai to Bangalore, and I think it's one of the best domestic flights I've ever taken. Despite the short trip time of 1 hour and 20 minutes, we were served a generous breakfast—a perk you wouldn't typically find on American or European domestic flights. I finally arrived in Bangalore at approximately 8:30 AM—six hours later than my originally scheduled arrival time due to the missed connection.

When traveling, I typically use airport Wi-Fi to call an Uber for my pickup. However, this time, the Wi-Fi required a local phone number to send a one-time password (OTP) for login. Since I didn’t have a local SIM and my roaming wasn’t working as expected, I walked towards the airport taxi rank and negotiated a price for the ride to the hotel where I was staying. I think the price I got was reasonable compared to the Uber rates. The taxi driver preferred cash payments. So, I went inside the airport to buy some local currencies, Indian Rupees (INR) and finally hopped on my ride.

Despite heavy traffic due to Bangalore's ongoing metro development, we reached the hotel in about an hour and a half—a typical journey time for many hotels in the city center. My driver was professional, spoke good English, and ensured my safe arrival at the destination.

By the time I finally checked into my hotel, it was around 11 am, and I had been traveling for over 24 hours. I was exhausted, but my fatigue quickly dissipated thanks to the warm welcome from the hotel staff and a bottomless pot of Masala Chai delivered to my room.

Lessons to learn in the future:

• Always try to arrange an airport pickup from the hotel you are supposed to stay. They are reliable and offer you a hassle-free experience.
• Buy a local SIM/e-SIM beforehand and don’t always rely on your career’s roaming. Sometimes things get messed up. I bought an e-SIM later because it was essential.
• Have a small amount of local currencies in hand because you will never know when you are about to enter a cash-only deal.
• Flight delays are expected in air travel. So, plan your connections wisely and be ready to accept the inevitable—you are going to miss it anyway. FYI, my layover at Doha was 2.5 hours. But I wish it could’ve been longer.

Day 2: Conference and Meetup

On the morning of day 2, I spoke at Serverless Days Bengaluru 2024. The conference venue was about 15 minutes from my hotel, so I called an Uber to get there. A brilliant keynote by Sheen Brisals kicked off the event. Sheen explained how serverless makes cloud computing accessible to everyone while mentioning how not to use serverless—several best practices for serverless developers. It was a good keynote.

My talk, Building Serverless Streaming ETL Pipelines with Redpanda, shortly followed after the keynote. The talk walked through the process of setting up a streaming ETL pipeline with Redpanda and Decodable with a short demo at the end. Due to the limited availability of Wifi at the venue, all speakers including myself, presented pre-recorded demos.

Despite running about 2 minutes over my allocated time, I managed to maintain a captive audience throughout. This was evident from the numerous engaging conversations I had with attendees after the talk.

I had the pleasure of meeting several friends from the DevRel field in person for the first time, including Giri Venkatesan from Solace and Kamesh Sampath from Snowflake. It was refreshing to connect, reminisce about the past, and learn from one another.

I’m also thrilled to meet some attendees who have been following my content on LinkedIn. We had deep conversations about some streaming data architectures that leverage Redpanda’s Wasm, Redpanda Connect, and local LLMs. As a creator, these are the moments I like to cherish.

Though tempted to spend the entire day attending the many excellent talks at the event, I had another talk scheduled for the afternoon with the Bangalore Streams meetup group. Fortunately, the meetup venue was only a few minutes away from the first event. I called another Uber, and despite the crazy traffic, my driver managed to get me to my destination on time.

My second talk discussed how Redpanda and Apache Pinot can be put together to design an API usage analytics solution. Despite being a Saturday evening, there was a good turnout for the meetup. The audience comprised data professionals from data-intensive organizations like ShareChat and Airbnb. My talk was filled with their questions, and I also had an excellent opportunity to learn from their streaming data experiences.

After the event, Pavan and the team from Platformatory, who organized the meetup, kindly treated me to dinner. I savored some of the best Karnataka dishes I've had in a long time.

Well, it was a quick trip of just two days. I wish I could’ve stayed in India a little longer than that. On the same day, I flew from Bangalore to Colombo, Sri Lanka for another quick stay before I headed out to Manchester. The cherry on top was the unexpected birthday celebration I received from Sri Lankan Airlines, which came as a delightful surprise.

Overall Impression

My trip to India was a safe, successful, and comfortable one.

This is the second time I’ve been to Bangalore. The city has changed a lot since my first visit in 2014. I witnessed the booming economy, improved infrastructure, and especially the buzzing human capital—India's energetic, ever-growing tech talent will be playing a significant role in the modern data and AI era.

Despite the initial travel hiccup, the trip was truly a rewarding experience in my DevRel career. I'm deeply grateful to everyone involved, especially the event organizers, for making this trip such a success.