There I was at Fueled Noida along with many others to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of the PyDelhi community. It had been just five months as a part of the community. The love and support of the members didn’t make it any less. Neither than the early joiners nor more than those who had joined that day. The celebration was followed by the organizing work for the PyDelhi Conf 2017.

There I landed my first work in the Tech industry. It is no shame to call it one of volunteering. For me there existed only one fact. Someone needed work, and I had the skills to provide it even at this early stage.

After all the cake, fun and networking, the volunteers gathered up to manage tasks for organizing the conference. My senior, Shyam Saini, introduced me that I was up for work. Mind this! You are supposed to initiate yourself, not always you would find someone helping you to grab opportunities.

I had previously worked on self-initiated front-end projects. When asked for some work on the conference’s website, I was excited to take up the work. I was instructed to collaborate on the site’s color scheme. I was relieved for receiving my first task pertaining to something I have previously been appreciated for. The work went well and suspended along with the meetup.

In a few days, there was a need for the conference’s T-shirt designs expressed on the Volunteers’ Telegram group. I had been self-learning design skills for nine years. Even though I hadn’t designed T-shirt formerly, this seemed an excellent opportunity to start with. I expressed my desire to design them. After a few hours of the thought process, I came up with the designs.

Fortunately, my designs received an overwhelming response! Everyone loved them. I was on cloud nine. That was a significant boost in my self confidence. Soon I was added to the conference’s volunteering design team for further work.

We started with making posters for announcements on the social media. They varied on Ticket pricing and deadlines, CFP (Call for Proposals) and Dev Sprints. With a rate of designing one each for a week, we soon came to designing one each for a day.

Skill.Up == Time_Management; //Really?

This was when I started learning about managing time more efficiently. I had to handle the conference’s organizing deadlines as well as my university’s work simultaneously. I remember how three weeks before the conference my work load had increased. The community was highly supportive not to let me lag behind work or feel stressed at all.

The work did not limit to posters. The design team had to collaborate on designing items for the welcome kit. It included the ID cards for the attendees, speakers and volunteers, writing pad, pen, conference’s laptop sticker, and the paper bag. We also had to work on designing the banners for side panels and podium, direction boards as well as backdrops.

It wasn’t just about considering the beauty of the design and its color scheme. It was about being sure that the designs made were of adequate dimensions and elements that would make it feasible for printing. Till then I had only produced digital designs unlike the requirement of designs for print usage. Hence, the designs called for revisions, not just among teams but the printing media which confirmed the feasibility of our design with their current technology. Initially, these changes would feel a bit of a heart break but soon I realized that it is all part of the job to get done right and what all of us wanted was a final product that would be loved and used by all.

When there were just 2 days to go!

Two days before the conference I, along with my club members at ALiAS reported at the venue, IIM Lucknow Noida Campus to help with the final organizing needed before the actual tech conference everyone had been eagerly waiting for since months. The perk was the food, small but loving laughing moments and yes getting to learn more work! I finally got to see the designs I had collaborated upon, printed in abundance when few of the volunteers got the task to organize the welcome kits and package them properly,! Oh, this felt unique and greater when I touched them myself.

Finally attending my first and much-awaited conference

PyDelhi Conf 2017

The day of the conference finally came. Entering the venue and having a look at the registration desk, I saw everyone being handed over the welcome kits one by one. Over 150 people possessed a welcome kit and wore the conference T-shirt. I saw my skill come to life.

This volunteering was more than just designing. It helped me with a lot of networking eventually. Whenever I introduced myself to anyone, mostly everyone would recognize me as a designer and would appreciate my work.

This is the most beautiful thing about one’s skill: To see it come to life, be used among the masses, to be kept before your name and hence be known for it.

My task for the conference days was to be the introduction speaker along with the members of ASET ALiAS, our Tech club at my university, Amity Noida. We were to ensure that every speaker gets introduced, is comfortable with the equipment and facilities provided and delivers their talk on time with convenience. The best part about the hall assigned to me was that it had the all the talks I had decided to attend and it was just beside the venue where the breakfast, lunch and high tea for the conference was arranged!

There were talks...

Between all the volunteering, I was free to roam around for networking and attend other talks. The conference started off with the keynote speaker, Ricardo Rocha. He talked about how and where Python is used by scientists and shared his experience while working at CERN. With all the accelerators’ media, I saw, I seemed to gain interest in physics.

This is special about listening to someone passionate about their work deliver a talk. They end up introducing to all the beautiful features they find in that field. Hence, giving off reasons to others unexperienced to fall in love with it too.

This happened when I attended the talk on Bayesian Statistics by Chris Stucchio on data science. It was an introductory talk which was interactive and based on real life examples. Hence, easier for me to understand it with no prior knowledge in data science, and bring in me the desire to read about it further.

...workshops

There were also workshops held along, on guiding one to build chat bots as well as make web/android based applications with Kivy framework based on Python.

...Panel discussions...

I also participated in my first panel discussion on my beloved and forever green concern “Women in Tech” where we celebrated women who have achieved great heights in their career and are an inspiration for all, or any woman in the attendees’ life who has proved to be an inspiration or a motivator. We also discussed the problems and hence solutions and opportunities already available specifically for women to increase their participation in tech and remove the barriers being encountered.

... DevSprint and my Conrtibution!

Finally, I, along with my club mate Ayush Aggarwal, ended up contributing to an Open Source Project, TextBrew, a text processing library used before feeding the text into the Deep learner. I initiated with adding the formats of PEP8 styling guides to the python files. I plan to continue my contribution to the project on other aspects and by coding.

The conference finally pulled off with a panel discussion among the members of all the communities present on collaboration to build a common ground for all.