Volunteering at Tech Conf is an opportunity to dip your toes into roles that you might not usually get to experience.
This year I had an opportunity to attend, volunteer, and deliver a Flash talk at Rootconf Delhi 2020. In this blog, I want to share my experience as a volunteer.
Rootconf is a platform to discuss real-world problems around Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), network management, cloud, infrastructure, distributed systems, and DevSecOps. This event brings new ideas, new community members, and novel problem-solving approaches. It is presented by HasGeek, which is an amazing community that organizes various conferences, hack nights, workshops, and geekups and provides tools for communities to self-organize.
I first came to know about Rootconf when my friend Pradhvan asked If I want to volunteer for this event. I immediately said, Yes! After all, who would miss the chance to meet amazing people over the weekend? Zainab Bawa and Anwesha das arranged a call for a team of volunteers. They were quite kind and humble and welcomed everyone. We divided our responsibilities. I felt that it was all quite systematic and helpful to avoid last moment hustle! We had our roles sorted! On the day of the conference, we reached quite early to the auditorium to get started with our work. As a hall manager, I ensured to maintain coordination throughout the day. Generally, for any successful event or a conference, we tend to take no notice of the team of volunteers and organizers who act as the backbone of the whole event. A key element for conference organizers to strive for is to make the event as seamless as possible for all participants. But accomplishing this can take a ton of work! Organizers and volunteers are essential for getting the job done. So kudos to the team!
The conference started with an amazing talk on “Vitess: Stateless Storage in the Cloud” by Sugu Sougoumarane. Vitess is a database solution for deploying, scaling, and managing large clusters of open-source database instances. Next was “Mapping the journey from VM-based deployments to Kubernetes” by Bhavin Gandhi. After a quick beverage break, we resumed with the talk “Around the cluster in 80 milliseconds: the journey of a packet” by Monica Gangwar. We were also having Birds of Feather (BOF) session: “On data stores” by Anush Arvind and Ritikesh G and “Kubernetes war” stories by Monica and Bhavin simultaneously which made the conference much more enjoyable. We had tracks on “Lessons learned in building the real-time Machine Learning inference platform at Zomato” by Nikunj Jain and “PubSub: real-time messaging service at Hotstar” by Piyush Gupta.
During the lunch break, many people got a chance to interact with likeminded people and industry peers. Isn’t this the beauty of conferences? Conferences are a great place for making connections and learn beyond your field of interest. I met terrific speakers and got to know more about their work. I might contribute to their open-source projects too!
For the next half of the conference, we resumed with a talk on “Meeseeks: service dependency graph at Flipkart” by Gaurav Sharma. Next was “Merging two live data-centers into one” by Anush Arvind. Meanwhile, we had many sessions in the BoF area on Devsecops, DevOps, and Monitoring.
Followed by our amazing talks, we had flash talks as well. Half of them were pre-selected and rest selected on the spot. Anwesha proposed this fantastic idea and is followed then onwards. I also got an opportunity to deliver a flash talk on “Keeping Pipelines Dry.” I was scared as hell and excited as well! You can check out my presentation here.
We ended the conference with the talk, “Not everything can fit in rows and columns” presented by Ashok Vishwakarma. We have all our talks recorded! You can find them here.
In the end, I would like to thank Anwesha and Zainab for trusting me and giving me an opportunity. I would love to be a part of this community for a longer time. Cheers to all the volunteers and organizers, which made everything possible!
Originally posted here!
