Like Calgary’s tech scene, DevFestYYC is growing and inviting the world’s developers to join in on the fun

Greg Bennett is co-founder of Google Developer Groups YYC and producer of DevFestYYC. Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Thanks to his multi-coloured robe, it’s not hard to spot Greg Bennett — even amongst the more than 850 attendees at DevFestYYC, a Google tech developer event that’s also part of Calgary Innovation Week. 

Bennett is co-founder of Google Developer Groups YYC and producer of Calgary’s DevFest. And he acquired his robe while attending Google I/O (the tech giant’s biggest annual developer conference) this past spring. 

Jokingly, he said he took advantage of his long “orangutan arms” to snag it, before anyone else in the bustling crowd around him could get their hands on the “collector’s item.”

“There’s maybe five or six of them in the world,” he explains.

That same enthusiasm has likely helped him, and an army of volunteers, grow the Calgary event into one of the largest DevFests in North America. This year’s festival encompasses two packed days of keynotes, bootcamps and workshops, and around 40% of the event speakers are from out of town.

If you’re not exactly sure what a DevFest is, no worries — Bennett gave us some background. 

They are annual events organized by the Google Developer Groups (GDG) community in their local region, and happen all around the globe between September and December, he said. “DevFests have been happening for 15 years … and there’s about 600 DevFests worldwide. So that’s the world’s largest distributed tech conference.” 

As Bennett explained it, the growth of the Calgary event — which first launched in 2018 with around 125 attendees — mirrors the ongoing transformation of the city’s broader tech scene. 

“Calgary has a lot going for it right now,” he said. “We’re the top 12th fastest growing tech ecosystem in the world, which is huge. There’s a lot of big places that could be growing faster than us.”

“We have incredible depth of technical ability here in Calgary,” Bennett continues. “That has put Calgary at the place where we can start to stand on a global-type stage and be able to hit above our weight.”

Guess what topic was the main focus at DevFestYYC?

If you answered “AI,” you were right, of course.

But AI — particularly generative AI — is on everyone’s minds because of how much adoption has increased in the past year. 

Sakshi Gupta, the final presenter at day one of Calgary’s DevFest, highlighted how the conversation surrounding AI has evolved from simply getting to know the tech, to now actually using and enhancing AI.

“Last year we were talking about, ‘what is AI?’” said the founder of dehlis and organizer of DevFest in Silicon Valley. “But this year we are talking about responsible AI.”

She said one of the big AI themes at both the Silicon Valley and Calgary DevFests this year is the importance of incorporating responsible practices into AI development. 

“To think about building responsibly, we have to have the right knowledge,” she noted. 

Gupta highlighted that many developers may not realize the data they’re using isn’t inclusive, which can lead to unintended biases in AI systems​. So, what’s the solution? 

“Training on more balanced data is important,” said Gupta. This might require using synthetic data to fill in blanks about a demographic group, to create a cohesive data set that you can train your models on, she said.

“Putting the models out there, testing with the real people, getting the real feedback, using diverse groups to take feedback from … I would say they are really important when building responsibility.”

Getting excited — and inspired — about where AI goes next

“What gets me excited is truly jumping around between [AI] modalities and seeing what the models can actually do,” said Tom Krywitsky, a data analytics and AI specialist with Google Cloud.

A keynote speaker at DevFestYYC, Krywitsky was talking about the potential of multimodal AI models, which can handle and combine multiple different types of data. (Think: video, text, audio and images). 

“You could feed in an hour of video and get it to do an inspection of maybe an energy asset,” he explained, giving an industry example. Or, if you’re a hockey team, you can upload your different types of data and then automatically generate segments or highlight reels, he continued. 

Krywitsky notes that these multimodal capabilities are still in the early stages of development, but that seems to be part of the fun — getting to watch or participate in the next phase of AI’s evolution. 

Speaking of fun, both Krywitsky and fellow presenter, Daniel Peluso, highlighted how the atmosphere at DevFest inspires developers’ creativity.

It’s like a music festival, said Peluso, senior software engineer at Klaviyo. 

For Peluso, who also helps to organize Boston’s DevFest, these events are about sparking ideas and igniting innovation, often in ways that extend beyond technical sessions or presentations. 

“Clearly, networking is good, knowledge transfer is good, learning about these new pieces of tech from the people who maybe write them or implement them [is good]. But I really think inspiration and reigniting the spark is probably one of the biggest benefits of [DevFest],” he said. 

“You see what people are doing with Gemini or with other pieces of tech, and you just kind of become so individually inspired by the possibilities the community is up to.”