New Delhi Salesforce Developer User Group Revival Meetup, 21st Feb, 2016

It's been a great and hectic last couple of week and I finally got the time out of my laziness to write about the awesome experience I had organizing and attending the New Delhi Salesforce Developer User Group(DUG) Revival Meetup.

It was an experience for sure as this was my first time organizing any such meetup. It was great learning opportunity to organize as well as to meet the awesome Salesforce Developers here in Delhi/NCR.

Let me first tell you how I got to organize the Meetup.

I actually wanted just to attend the New Delhi Meetup and kept on posting on the meetup group about when is the next meetup, but I didn't got any reply. Then I noticed it's been 2 years since the last meet of the group and there seemed to be no activity on the group as well. I was disappointed.

Then I reached out to Rajdeep Dua and April Kyle Nassi to check if I can re-initiate the group and to my good fortune, they agreed :)

And hence, I became the organizer of the New Delhi Salesforce DUG. 

The date of the meetup was decided to be 21st Feb, 2016 and Shashank Srivatsavaya offered to come down to the meetup and present on Lightning Design System.

I was also fortunate to get Abhinav Gupta to present on Lightning Components. 

Great, now I just needed a couple of sponsors for the goodies and nice place to hold the meetup. It can become an issue finding a nice place in New Delhi but I stumbled upon a nice coworking space called Coworkin where I can hold the meetup. Great, place decided.

Now for the meetup goodies. I was fortunate to get generous sponsorship from Ibirds Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Ajmer and Concretio Apps Pvt. Ltd. 

Now on the D-Day i.e. 21st Feb, 2016, I was pretty excited as well as nervous. But looking at the enthusiastic crowd eager to talk and learn about Salesforce at the meetup really upped my spirits.

The meetup started with the welcoming everyone and introducing to New Delhi Salesforce DUG, making them understand

What is it?

New Delhi Salesforce DUG the official Developer User Group of New Delhi. It is one of the 157 Salesforce developer and user groups all  around the world.

What's its purpose?

Developer User Group(DUG) is a fantastic way to connect, meet, learn from other Salesforce Developers in your area. They provide a way to gather in one place for everyone who is part of this Awesome Salesforce Community and learn and share their knowledge and resources.

Why come to a Meetup?

1. Learn about Salesforce
2. Learn from more Experienced Developers
3. Network for Career, Certifications
4. Share and Celebrate what Salesforce has got to offer –
   1. Unlimited things to learn
   2. A Rewarding Career
   3. An Awesome Community
5. Free Food and Goodies

Then I introduced myself and our awesome presenters.

Shashank Srivatsavaya is a Senior Developer Advocate Engineer for India Developer Relations at Salesforce.

Abhinav Gupta is the founder of Concretio Apps Pvt. Ltd, 5 times Salesforce MVP in a row and is an expert in Salesforce technology.

Now due to an emergency Shashank Srivatsavaya was not able to make it to the meetup and due to protests going on in Delhi/Gurgaon, Abhinav Gupta couldn't be there. So we had remote session for both Lightning Design System and Lightning Components by both the presenters respectively.

The audience got to know about what exactly are Lightning Design System and Lightning Components. How and where to use them. It was very pleasing to see everybody learning and asking questions.

Shashank and Abhinav answered all the questions of the developers and actually showed demos of how to go about building an application in Lightning Components and Lightning Design System.

After the presentations we had a small quiz and it's winners :)

I suppose guys became hungry till this point, so some of them got busy with the Pizzas :D

In the end everybody were distributed out the awesome goodies :)

I want to thank everyone for coming out to the meetup. Special thanks to the Awesome Presenters we had

Shashank Srivatsavaya 

Abhinav Gupta

A big thanks to the Sponsors who generously supported this meetup

Ibirds Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Ajmer

Concretio Apps Pvt. Ltd. 

Interested in more pictures from the meetup, check here https://bit.ly/1PS5aHT-

As part of the feedback I got by personally interacting with some of the attendees, I understood that they really liked the technical nature of the meetup. They were quite happy to learn new things and wanted me to keep the next meetup on the same theme.

I also introduced something called #SalesforceSaturday, which can help on a Saturday once or twice a month, where everyone and anyone from the Salesforce Community can participate to finish up Trailhead badges and discuss about Salesforce further.

The feedback I got from the members was to rather than just finishing up Trailhead badges, the even should be additionally used as a platform to share Salesforce Knowledge.

So the format can be that volunteers from the Salesforce community itself can prepare a topic on Salesforce and give out a presentation/knowledge sharing session either online or offline in the #SalesforceSaturday.

I'm further checking the willingness of the Community here in Delhi to continue with this concept or not. I've sent out a survey understand everyone's perspective around this. Those of you who haven't yet, please fill out this survey.

https://goo.gl/forms/bNpKjQONPQ

I hope to get the awesome members we already have in Delhi/NCR to come as one in a community and actively participate and share in the community.