GDG DevFest Sofia 2018

It is never easy to organise an IT conference. It is even harder, when the conference is part of international franchise with tens of thousands of attendees worldwide. Still, we at Qualifast are not scared of the difficult - we were a core part of the three-company pact that made the first Google Developer Group DevFest happen.

DevFests are great events where IT professionals of all functions gather and learn from internationally-recognized experts. DevFest Sofia featured interesting sessions from diverse domains, from Cloud, to mobile, ML, marketing and smart assistants:

1. Cloud Native - effective computing at scale - Ignacy Kowalczyk - Software engineering manager, Google
2. Google Maps Platform - Selen Basol - Tech Lead Manager, Google
3. Building assistive apps with App Actions - Elaine Dias Batista - Assistant Google Developer Expert
4. Mobile DevOps - Boris Strandjev - CEO, Qualifast
5. How we built a successful cloud-scale product with GCP - Borislav Pantaleev - Full Stack web developer, MobiSystems
6. The case for experimentation using Google Optimize - Peter Perlepes
7. ML and I - Daniel Balchev, ML engineer Hyperscience
8. Cultivating a Microservice Culture Via Tooling - Tom Vance - Holiday Extras
9. The best of both worlds - achieving next-level code sharing between Flutter and the mobile web - Iiro Krankka - Flutter Google Developer Expert

We received great feedback for the sessions, which makes us especially proud as Qualifast was responsible for choosing the sessions,

About 24 hours before the event a huge blow to the planned program happened - two of the featured speakers were forced to cancel their sessions. Given this short notice, the organisers did the best they could - the keynote of Ignacy got longer and we added one additional session - Boris Strandjev, our CEO, re-did the "Mobile DevOps" session he did a week earlier at ISTA. The attendees appreciated this talk too and we were given the great honor to contribute content to the first DevFest in Sofia!