DevFestW Campinas

What is DevFestW?

Quoting the main site:

DevFestW is a series of community-led events that have technical sessions centered around Google developer technologies and platforms. DevFestW is focused specifically on bringing together women in the local developer community to teach, learn, code and network.

DevFestW Campinas

DevFestWs were supposed to be held in March, but we had to postpone ours to yesterday (April 10th) because of some problems with location. Finally, we got a lot of support from Dextraining to promote the event, from food to location, to video cameras to record the event, so we decided to do it even so late.

We planned a small event, we had 24 spots and we expected it to run for two hours. Here, usually we have 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 (Dextraining is a training school, as anyone can guess by the name). 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 Ferraz, 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. Viviane told us about UX in general, then showed us a use case from an Android app she developed.

Coffee-break followed with lots of interactions. I talked with Cesar Nogueira, 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, Russell, Jonas and Bruno, who I met in DevFestW São Paulo and are starting a new GDG in Indaiatuba, a city near here.

After coffee-break, we had two Android talks, a introductory one 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 from such specific theme, 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, this one was the most special gift for me).

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.

Some pictures here and below, but there are more to come.

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