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What I learned speaking at GDG Vizag DevFest 2024

Tue Dec 10 2024SpeakingCommunityGDGAI

Talking to 1000+ students at GITAM Vizag about frontend, AI tooling, and building in public.

I had the opportunity to speak at GDG Vizag DevFest 2024 at GITAM University — 1000+ attendees, packed rooms, huge energy.

Takeaways

  • Students learn fastest by building. Live demos beat slides every time.
  • AI tooling is the new baseline. Everyone asked about Cursor, Copilot, and how to review AI-generated code.
  • Fundamentals still win. Semantic HTML, CSS layout, and JS async patterns came up more than any framework.

My talk structure

  1. How I approach a frontend feature (break it, then refine).
  2. Where AI helps vs. where it hallucinates.
  3. Shipping a small project end-to-end: editor → build → deploy.

Thanks to Usha Ramani Vemuru and the GDG Vizag team for the platform — and to every attendee who stayed back with questions.