The India Developer Community is the second largest in the world after the US. We’ve always wanted to play a part in the Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS), the largest developer conference in India, with 4000+ attendees every year, and this year Salesforce made a splash as a platinum sponsor.

GIDS had a footfall of about 5000 attendees this year, between April 26 and 30. The conference followed different themes spread over 5 days every year, with 4 days at Bangalore’s J.N. Tata Auditorium, and GIDS.MINI on the 5th day at Pune’s Hyatt.

Salesforce had it’s own area, pretty much a mini-expo along with demo pods and a Trailhead Quick Start area where attendee developers registered for a free Developer Edition and built their first app on the Salesforce App Cloud in minutes! Did you spot Astro in there?

Every participating attendee took away  a cool Lightning T-shirt, a Force.com Fundamentals book, and most importantly, a smile! We did a raffle every day for one lucky developer who would win an iPad, and we gave away a flashy new Macbook Pro.

Apart from the expo area, we also did the following sessions:

• Salesforce App Cloud overview – Rajdeep Dua and Sonam Raju
• Trailhead Hands-on workshop – Shashank Srivatsavaya and Naga Kiran Manyala
• Operationalize Big Data as a Service – Ravi Kishore Valeti

The Keynote by Rajdeep on “Tech careers and learning in the 21st century” was packed and was a big hit.

To see more of the action that happened, you can checkout the Twitter hashtag #sfdcgids and #gids16. We would like to thank everyone involved with this event for their support and for sharing our passion. And of course, we’ll be back next year!