DevFest 2025 & Sheridan Datathon
Recap of an incredible weekend at DevFest 2025 and Sheridan Datathon, where our team built 'Avocado', an AI driven Monthly Expense projector that won the Best Use of GCP award, among the top 4 projects!
8 hours of DevFest and 15 hours of Hacking!! The most thrilling weekend thus far. Past weekend, I had the opportunity to participate in DevFest 2025 organized by Google Developer Student Clubs Sheridan and the Sheridan Datathon 2025. It was an exhilarating experience filled with learning, collaboration, and innovation.
At DevFest, I attended insightful sessions on the latest technologies and trends in the developer community. The event provided a platform to connect with so many developers, share ideas, and gain inspiration from industry experts.
Following DevFest, we participated in the Sheridan Datathon 2025, where we went on a coding spree for 15 hours to build a solution addressing real-world challenges. Our project, 'Avocado', helps you find out the true cost of living in a city, we pull data from news articles, weather information in the region and these metrics are fed to our ML weighted model, trained on RandomRegressor Classifier, which generates a AvoScore. Avoscore helps us in predicting the overall cost of living and the breakdown of all the features are also accessible using SHAP’s explainability. If you’re a student on a co-op term and thinking of switching places, Avocado is here! (We watch the prices of Avocado seriously!) We leveraged technologies such as Python, RandomForest, RandomRegressor, GCP Cloud Run, Google Maps API, and Gemini to create a robust and user-friendly application.
The highlight of the weekend was when our team was honoured with the Best Use of GCP award, placing us among the top 4 projects.
Participating in DevFest 2025 and the Sheridan Datathon was an incredible experience that not only enhanced my technical skills but also fostered teamwork and problem-solving abilities. I'm grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with talented individuals and contribute to innovative solutions that can make a positive impact.
A big thank you to the organizers, mentors, and fellow participants for pulling this off!. Looking forward to more such exciting opportunities in the future!