Saturday, 10 October, at the Panaji Convention Centre. The 16th DevFest Goa is done, and I’m still going through my notes from the day.
If you’re not from Goa, some context. DevFest is the only developer conference we have in the state supported by Google for Developers. It’s run by Google Developer Groups (GDG) Goa, and it happens every year because a bunch of people keep showing up and doing the work. I’ve been part of GDG Goa for 16 years, so this event is personal for me.
Sofueled at Devfest Goa:
This year, as in many past years, SoFueled was a sponsor. I’ve been building SoFueled out of Goa for over a decade, with a team here working for clients across many countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, Singapore, and Canada. So supporting the one event that puts Goan developers in a room with people from Salesforce, Qualcomm, OneCard, and Cobweb MENA was an easy decision. If we want companies to hire in Goa, they first need to see what’s here.
More than 400 delegates came in from across India. The theme was #Any.Body.Can.Code. And looking around the hall, it fit. Students, working engineers, founders, and a few people who were clearly at their first tech event. That mix is the whole point.
I was also invited to speak, and I kept my message simple. Build your venture here, hire local talent, and work from Goa. Every engineer who stays back instead of moving to Bengaluru or Pune, and every company that hires here, adds to the state’s economy.
I also spoke about where Goa is right now. With the state’s AI and IT policies and a tech community that’s been building for years, we have a solid base to grow from. What we need is more people choosing to build on it, and more collaboration between us. My ask to the room was to build from Goa for the world.
One moment I’ll remember for a while was presenting a token of appreciation to DS Prashant, SPC Head, Goa. You don’t often see the govt officials and a hall full of developers on the same stage, and I think that says a lot about where things are heading. Tech in Goa isn’t only an IT industry conversation anymore.
Speakers at Devfest Goa 2026:
The sessions this year were mostly about AI agents, and I liked that very few speakers oversold them.
Jay Thakkar, AI/ML Engineer and Google Developer Expert, spoke on securing AI agents at scale. He went through what changes when a prototype goes into production and the security problems that come with scaling. His advice was to understand how the whole system works, not only the generative AI part. Kartikey Rawat from Qualcomm made a similar point from another angle. He talked about running AI on the device so data doesn’t have to be sent anywhere, and kept coming back to system design. An agent is one piece of the application, not the whole thing.
Cost came up again and again, which tells you where most teams are at the moment. Ekta Shah from MSCI had the title of the day: “Prompt Engineering Got You In. Token Budgeting Gets You Out.” She shared experiments on balancing token usage against accuracy and why well-structured context matters. Mrinal Prakash Desai picked up the same thread in “Stop Burning Tokens”, on building LLM apps that don’t eat through your budget.
Tarandeep Singh’s talk, “Your Agent is Not Smart. Your Context is,” was the most quotable title on the agenda. Ajoe Joseph, GDE in Cloud AI, showed how to connect remote agents with Google’s Agent Development Kit and the Agent2Agent SDK. Namrata More from OneCard took it into the workplace with enterprise agents built on Google Workspace and Gemini.
Aarshad Devani from Cobweb MENA introduced WebMCP in a session called “Your Website is Now an API for AI Agents.” If you run any kind of website, that title alone should get your attention. And Geeta Kakrani, GDE in AI/ML, covered multimodal agents using the Gemini Live API and Gemini Omni.
DevFest is the big day, but it sits on a full year of work by GDG Goa. Build with AI, Solve for Goa, Agrithon, Goa Code Premier League, Code for Communities, and Cloud Connect Days all came together at the event. These programmes put developers in front of real local problems, working with government, industry, and startups, and a lot of good work comes out of them through the year without much noise.
After 16 editions, what stays with me is that the reason behind all this hasn’t changed. Goa has the talent. It needs more people willing to back it, hire it, and build alongside it.
Thank you to every speaker, volunteer, and delegate who gave up their Saturday, to the GDG Goa team who pulled it together, and to my fellow sponsors. See you at the 17th.
Arjun Naik