On 27th and 28th April we had the second in-person (and third total) version of the Makerville Conference at mBedrock's office in Pune. I am quite late to write down the blog post about the event :)

We had plenty of new faces, a lot of the old faces from the 2023 conference - and this time we also had 2 remote sessions from members of the community - Akshar from Vicharak & Syed from Rocketry India.

Some highlights

• Shekar & Mahendra from Tacitbase joined us to share some stories from the trenches of hiring and recruiting. This was a much needed as building and managing a team is a pain point for pretty much everyone. (#drupal)
• Chinmay got some Makerville themed coasters. Everyone took one home (almost everyone - some forgot and now I have them!)
• It was JT's first time to the in-person conference, and he (and his wife) brought some behind-the-scenes stories about building, scaling and taking a hardware company public in India.
• With Anool & JT, we got a lot of "how things used to be done before everyone had a computer" stories!
• Dhiru got his radio gear and setup an antenna on the glass walls of mBedrock. We then sent signals halfway across the globe. Plenty of amateur radio stories too!
• Syed from Rocketry India did a great remote session about their last years efforts, and what they have in store for the build this year.
• Akshar couldn't make it in-person this time - so he joined in remotely as well and updated us about Vichaarak, Vaman, and more.
• Sarvesh did a deep-dive session about very accurate time synchronization.
• Akshay shared stories from when he worked with cell towers. This included some great photos that he had taken from the top of a tower!
• Jayant got a bunch of 3d-printed keychains for everyone and spoke about running a 3d printing service business.
• Rituparna got a big box of dominos (not the pizza) and we had some fun trying (and mostly failing) to set up fun patterns.
• Priyanshu spoke about humanoids and the different challenges that they are tackling when building them.
• Amit spoke about Zephyr - his favorite topic ofcourse. We have a great shirt planned for the next conference on that topic.
  PS - Dhiru got involved in Zephyr efforts for CH32v and posted an update about that not long after the conf on the telegram group

It's hard to write down everything that happened in two days - especially when it involves a lot of amazing food and accompanying conversations. Here's to 2 great days, and many such conferences in the future!