First experience on the GDG Dev Fest Kathmandu

i had the hope of people attending fewer than 100, but as i got there, there were far more people than i anticipated. there were almost 300 of them.

the first feeling i got was feeling of overwhelming. i am not yet used to the crowd.

the first one i met was the person who lost his way to our destination -- techspire college. I helped him and got him with me. his name was, oh i forgot. i am really bad with remembering names.

then as i got there, i sat on the last in another session of flutter which i was not interested in. i wanted to attend the ai session where they were supposed to teach the basics of ml with regression and classification. missed it cz i was late and seat was full.

then i sat on the last with an intersting person named Viraj Sawad. I proly remember his name because I felt importance coming from him. why? he was on the same boat as me but was ahead in the currents.

we both were not interested in flutter session and we both were learning ai. but he had already gone to develop his mini gpt from the scratch. after our introduction, he taught me how the gpts are made, what attention is in transformers, the encoder-decoder & decoder only models. then he taught me how they behave and how models predict the next token.

he too was bored by the abstraction in the builder side of the ai, where you build ai applications with the use of inference or apis from the models. thats why he switched to learning the bts from scratch. i felt that too and i am also on the way to learn the same, and in the same way.

he basically told me to build the intuition, and not to waste my time on learning everything from the scratch, and as i implement the already existing, i can fill the gaps or just search for how something works rather then knowing deep about it. though it pays heavy when learning deep, it's not the time because i need a stable job as soon as possible. so i am learning the deep stuff as the side quest parallely and going all out on backend and building side with the use of already existing models.

this was it for the first session, second session was the same -- flutter, however there was an interesting instructor with us. i forgot his name. he was direct and engaging. he told us that he is the GDE (google developer expert) for flutter and there are only 2 people in nepal who are gde, another one is of AI, Kshitiz Rimal.

He explained us about the power of networking and the ripple effects it creates when you do the contributions to the open source projects. basically he had worked his ass off to get there and all that he achieved was due to networking.

viraj and i were on the same seat again and just on the back seat of ours were two youngters who were killing the game. both were on the ai field and the robotics. the communication style was phenominal. they were confident on what they were doing.

i again felt small. yeah i compared with them but it sparked a little to me, how insignificant i am to the vast world. they say, surround yourself with the winners, and the bar you thought your actual potential, will rise. you will rise because humans by default are built to grow and adapt to the situation.

it is survival. it is the primal instinct.