On October 19th 2019, I was supposed to give a presentation or a conference talk on Building and Deploying Node.JS apps with Azure but things took a turn and I had to slightly modify the scope of my session and do something little different or less than what I was supposed to do. The reason why I had to do was lack of internet connectivity, the time frame of the session and whether students/participants would grasp all the information we provide or not because it was already too much till that point.

About the Conference

The event we organized was called STUDENT DEVELOPER DAY and 4 of us were organizers. Diwash Shrestha, Binod Jung Bogati and Yunip Shrestha were the other 3 members of the organizing team. The content for the event was provided by Major League Hacking.

What does it feel like to organize and speak at a conference?

I would not like to give myself much credit in the organizing part of the event as I did not do much on it, except designing some banners and the posts for social media. All credit goes to my brothers Diwash and Binod for working so hard in the organizing part of the event.

Whenever I try to do something, I always think about the impact it might have. In terms of impact, this event was a huge success because I was able to teach what I know to about 30-40 people and also, due to the feedback I got on the days that followed the event, I am overwhelmed by the appreciation by the people.

We were really able to give something to the tech community of Nepal from the session and we are going to organize more events in the future. That's a promise.

The Networking Part

Whenever you organize or attend events, you're likely to meet new people. This event was not an exception. I got to meet with someone who has been programming since 1983, which is long before I was even born and also someone who wants to improve the quality of software engineers in Nepal. Events also let you market yourself and your skills in the community. I guess it will also get me some more reach in the blogs I write. 😉😉

Learning from the failures

Whenever you organize events, you want it to go smoothly and be right in all the aspects but the possibility of the event going right as you expect is thin. You might ask why? Here are the reasons why.

• Nepali Time is the synonym for unpunctuality in Nepal.
• People might not care about events. I invited more than 15 people I know in the events but only 3 of them were present.
• Getting the target audience is also tough most of the times because the content might be too basic for a group of audience and too tough for the other.
• The internet in Nepali colleges are so bad. I don't understand the purpose of internet service in colleges because it's so difficult to get connectivity.

These are the things that you have to be prepared to tackle during events. You can solve some of them.

To solve the unpunctuality problem, you can host an event at 11 AM and tell students that the event is going to start at 9, might solve the issue. 😉

Don't expect your friends to attend the events because they will not. The people close to you will have least amount of appreciation for things that you're trying to do.

To solve the issue with target audience, try to be in the middle ground. Also, you can study the target audience prior to the event and deliver content accordingly.

Next events

I don't have a proper announcement for this but some time during November, the team that organized Student Developer Day is planning to do another event. Stay tuned to this blog and my social media in order to get notified for the announcement.