I was in Istanbul to take part in the Istanbul leg of the GDG event this time, which I had previously attended in Kütahya and found beneficial in various aspects. My close friends Furkan Çınar and Enes Beşinci accompanied me to the event. Naturally, there was higher attendance and more speakers compared to the GDG I attended in Kütahya.

Due to the intense interest I saw in Kütahya, we hit the road for the Istanbul event with the opening of the subway, at 6 in the morning. Afterwards, upon reaching the venue where the seminars would be held, a registration section was the first thing waiting for us inside. In this section, we were given lanyards with mini chips inside. These allowed us to electronically vote on options like good, average, or bad regarding how the seminars went as we exited.

With the start of the seminars, we first attended the session of a friend who presented information about Android programming. I don’t remember the names of the speakers right now, but I will update the article later, or I can share the paper with the speakers’ names here. Following that, there was a knowledge-sharing session where a person from the team that developed the game for the animated film Evliya Çelebi: The Water of Immortality told us about the development stages of this game and what programs were used, how, and in what way during its creation.

After this seminar, we attended a session by a foreign developer that also included topics like HTML and CSS. Apart from these, there was a discounted sale of many programming-related books at the hall entrance. Also, Turkcell distributed backup battery packs for phones to everyone who attended. Of course, this was valid for people who registered for the Writers of the Future program.

Besides that, it was good that they distributed sandwiches and tea during the seminar; otherwise, the breakfast we had in the morning would only get us so far. In general, I can say the seminar went somewhere between average and good for me. Because I can say I suffered the ordeal of going to the seminar without getting any sleep that day. But ultimately, the fact that so many people gathered there to hold such a seminar was truly a commendable act of volunteering. Hopefully, there will be more events like this, and we will attend them too. By the way, I am aware that I wrote this article a bit late.