DevFest 2025 — Organizing at Scale

What DevFest Is

DevFest is Google's annual global developer festival — thousands of GDG chapters run local versions simultaneously around the world. The structure is yours to design; the community is Google's. It's the year's biggest event for any GDG chapter.

For us at GDG On Campus GU, it was our most ambitious event of the year.

The Work Behind It

Organizing an all-day developer conference as a student team is genuinely difficult. There's a coordination problem at every level: securing a venue, scheduling speakers, managing registrations, running the day-of logistics, and keeping everything on time.

Speaker curation — We wanted practitioners over theorists. People who could talk about what they're actually building, not about concepts from a slide deck.

Workshop tracks — Ran parallel tracks so attendees could choose depth (technical workshops) or breadth (talk sessions). Different audiences need different formats.

Day-of execution — The gap between a good plan and a good event is execution. We'd coordinated rehearsal runs for the AV setup, speaker timing, and transition management.

The Day

A full room. Talks that ran to Q&A overflows because people were engaged. Workshop participants who didn't leave at the breaks. That's the signal that it worked.

The feedback that mattered most: several first-year students said it was the first time they'd felt like part of a tech community. That's the point.