The Power of Listening: Community-Driven Devfest 2024

This year's Devfest was truly a community effort. Back in July and August 2024, we actively solicited feedback to shape the event, resulting in a program that delivered exactly what our developers wanted: engaging talks, a rewarding hackathon, and plenty of networking opportunities.

How Community Feedback Shaped Devfest 2024

We engaged with our community to gather their insights on what an ideal Devfest would entail. Three key elements consistently emerged: a hackathon, food, and project demonstrations. During the planning phase, we began by defining the theme for the hackathon, identifying partners, drafting concept notes, sourcing vendors, and organizing the program for the community.

The Thrill of Competition: Highlights from Our Fintech Hackathon

A diverse group of people applied with some brilliant ideas. They were shortlisted to 10 groups for a polishing session on the 25th of October 2024 hosted at the Impact Hub Harare. The challenge for the teams and individuals was to develop a tool that assisted banks in making informed lending decisions. The participants started by conducting an analysis to identify important metrics, such as credit history, income levels, debt-to-income ratios, and employment stability, which influenced repayment likelihood. Next, they developed a robust scoring mechanism to rank these metrics by importance, creating a clear and concise credit risk score that summarized the borrower's reliability. Finally, the participants designed an intuitive user interface that facilitated easy data input and interpretation, enabling users to navigate the tool confidently, regardless of their technical expertise.

What stood out the most for me was the winner of the hackathon who highlighted their dedication to win and had a sleepless 24 hours. Farai Masocha developed a scoring platform using a simple yet intelligent mechanism. he went on to deliver an impactful presentation using the interface's user interface with no slides. It was exciting to see for the crowd and the judges. Everyone put forth a strong effort with impressive presentations and solutions. The future is bright, people.

Demos That Dazzled: A Recap of Our Engaging Speaker Sessions

1. Brandon Tinotenda Bande who took us through the ABCs of computer vision with Gemini. In his talk titled A,B, See he took the crowd through a Colab notebook implementing a functional AI-powered Computer Vision project using an old phone, Python, and Gemini AI in 20 minutes.
2. Kelvin Carrington Tichana highlighted that the various use cases for AI models on constrained devices. He delivered a great keynote showcasing the crowd favourite ?M.I.S.C.H.I.E.F (Modeling Intelligent System for Controlling Home Interactions and Efficient Functioning) project.
3. David Innocent Fadaraliki inspired the crowd especially the startup staff and founders in the crowd as he gave practical walk-throughs of the Google Cloud platform. He started off his talk with a popular developer line " It works on my machine" and shared that it should work on everybody's machine and the best way of doing that is using the cloud.

A special mention to Ronald Nyamukuwa and Tinevimbo Musingadi who delivered brilliant talks.

Looking Ahead: What’s Next for Our Tech Community After Devfest 2024?

What’s next? The best way to find out is to become part of our Google Developer Groups community, where you can get the latest updates on upcoming events, programs, and training sessions. Here are some programs you can participate in: can participate in:

• Google Cloud Innovator Program
• Google Cloud Skills Boost: Hands-on cloud learning.
• Women Techmakers (WTM): Empowering women in tech.
• Google Developer Experts (GDE): Become a recognized expert.
• Google Startup School
• Google Developer Groups on Campus