Monthly Archives: August 2013

Event Report of @GhoseB’s 2-Day Clojure workshop – by @SwaroopCH

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Last weekend BG aka @ghoseb conducted a 2-day free Clojure workshop – which was “sold out” and many people had to be disappointed.

Swaroop C H (who is famous for many things, one of which is A Byte of Python a free online book that has helped many people learn Python), was apparently in town, and attended the two sessions.

He has written a detailed and insightful event report. Here is his report of day 1 and report of day 2.

BG has promised to conduct another workshop for the people who couldn’t be accommodated in the first one due to space constraints.

Turing100 Lecture: Talk on Life & Work of 2008 Turing Award Recipient Barbara Liskov

Events, Featured, , , , , , ,

In 2008, Barbara Liskov was given the Turning Award for contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.

Ajay Deshpande, Chief Architect at Persistent Systems will give a talk on the life and work of Barbara Liskov, on 31st August, from 2pm to 5pm at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent (SB Road).

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

About the Turing Awards

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science.

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

This is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet) Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Latest schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 31 August.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here

Credenz’13 : 3-day tech fest at PICT College 30 Aug-1 Sept

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Credenz is the annual technical symposium organised by the PICT IEEE Student Branch. With 4000+ students from 50 different colleges attending, it is one of the top student tech fests, not only in the city, but in the country too.

Credenz this year will be from 30 August to 1st September.

From the Credenz website:

Inaugurated in 2004, with an aim to celebrate talent, it has prospered to become one of the finest technical events in the country. Credenz not only infuses a competitive spirit among participants, but it also provides an informative edge through various seminars and workshops conducted by eminent industry professionals. Participants get to experience a diversity of events like Clash, Bplan, Roboliga, WebWeaver, Pixelate, Mad Talks and seminars on recent technologies.

The IEEE Student branch at PICT has always believed in encouraging students to think beyond the academic domain and challenge their potential. The team changed the entire face of Credenz in the year 2009 when the entire event was hosted online due to the pandemic swine flu, which had made social gatherings impossible. Following the legacy, their juniors made Credenz’10 a great success. Now the PICT IEEE Student Branch presents to you Credenz’13 with an even wider platform to let students showcase their skills and talents.

More Info about Credenz 2013:

There is also an online software/app development contest that you can participate in right now

For full information, see the Credenz Website

11 Tech/Startup Events in Pune this weekend

Events, ,

If you’re not subscribed to the PuneTech Calendar, you might not have realized that this weekend is packed with tech and/or startup events in Pune – 11, in fact.

Unless otherwise specified, these events are free and open to anybody who’s interested in attending. A few are paid events, and this is clearly mentioned below.

Here’s a quick overview. To get more details about any event – including venue, time and registration information, go to PuneTech Calendar and click on the event link.

Friday, 23 August, evening

  • 6:30pm: TiE Pune Event – A New Model of Leadership

Saturday, 24 August

  • Pune’s Microsoft Technologies User Group – PUG has a 2 day DevCon that kicks off on Saturday morning and continues on until Sunday evening.
  • A 2 day free Clojure workshop by Baishampayan Ghose of Helpshift at BMC Software. Unfortunately, this workshop had limited seats and got full almost immediately after being announced. They are hoping to have more such workshops in the future. Make sure you’re subscribed to the PuneTech Calendar so you don’t miss the announcement.
  • RailsGirlsPune – a One Day Ruby-on-Rails workshop for Women
  • A Paid Sales and Marketing Beginners Workshop for Entrepreneurs
  • Part 2 of a Workshop on Big Data with Hadoop
  • A Paid Hands-On workshop on the GIT distributed version control system
  • Part 3 of A Hands-On Session for Amazon AWS Developers
  • SAP HANA get-together

Sunday, 25 August

  • A meetup of everybody interested in the Corona SDK (a leading mobile development framework)
  • Internet-of-things Meetup: Hands-on with Beagle Bone Black + Python + OpenCV

To get more details about any event – including venue, time and registration information, go to PuneTech Calendar and click on the event link.

About the PuneTech Calendar

If you got this update in your email or RSS feed, but you did not see any of the above events, that means that you’re subscribed to the PuneTech main blog, but you are not subscribed to the PuneTech events calendar. Since there are many tech events happening in Pune, we don’t put all the event announcements on the main blog. Hence, if you’re interested in attending events, you should subscribe to
get event announcements by email. Click here to subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar of events.

Opinion: Pune’s IT industry must focus on electronic design (ESDM) – Gouri Agtey Athale

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Gouri Agtey Athale has an interesting article in the Pune Mirror pointing out that following the success of the “animation and gaming” niche sector, the IT industry in Pune should start focusing on other niche sectors – for example electronic design.

Excerpts:

[The] niche area of animation and gaming has worked out for Pune the way the software industry worked on the existing industrial base: combining the existing dormant and untapped potential and build a whole new business out of it.

Pune’s arrival on the animation and gaming scene has received recognition at the international level: two animation films made by companies based in Pune have made it to the list of Oscar nominations, Krayon’s Delhi Safari and Reliance Big’s Krishna and Kaunsa.

and

That was in the past: the move now is to move on and the next wave could be a convergence of the hardware and software sectors to create ESDM, or Electronic System Design and Manufacturing. Cmde (retd) Anand Khandekar, former member of the IT committee of the MCCIA, who helped draft the state’s IT policy over a decade ago, suggested that existing expertise in embedded software and the presence of the hardware sector in the city could be married to the city’s industrial culture and the educational base to create an industry around ESDM.

The blue print that ESDM is looking at is that of the automotive sector, where there are vendors who supply to the original equipment manufacturer, the OEM. On these lines, local entities could become vendors to global companies, the example usually cited being that of Taiwanbased companies who work on projects for global majors like Apple, Oracle-Sun Micro and Google- Motorola.

and finally:

And the sector needs a champion, a strong, non-partisan platform, which in the case of Pune’s software industry was the MCCIA.

Read the full article

Free 2-Day Intensive Clojure Workshop – 24-25 Aug

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the Pune Clojure User Group is organizing an intensive 2-day workshop on Clojure – on 24-25 August. The workshop is designed for programmers who have been using imperative programming languages so far and will give them a solid foundation in Functional Programming, Clojure & the Lisp-way.

The course is completely free of charge thanks to gracious hosts, BMC Software. Seats are limited, so hurry!

Course Content

  • Data Structures
  • Functional Programming
  • Sequences & Collections
  • JVM Interop
  • Concurrency
  • OO & Polymorphism
  • Macros
  • A lot more!

Prerequisites

You don’t need any prior experience with Clojure, Lisp or Functional Programming but we do expect that all participants will have at least an intermediate level of experience with any programming language. We can’t teach you programming in two days but if you already know some programming we can definitely teach you a different (and extremely elegant) way of solving non-trivial problems.

You’ll have to bring your own laptop to the course. WiFi will be provided at the venue.

It’s also recommended that you setup your favourite editor for editing Clojure so that we can get started very quickly. Some resources are given in the resources section and others can be found online.

If you still have questions feel free to ask on the Pune Clojure mailing list.

About the Instructor – Baishampayan Ghose

Baishampayan “BG” Ghose has been a professional Lisp programmer for most of his career. He has been using Clojure since the early days and has contributed to Clojure and multiple libraries in the Clojure ecosystem. His areas of interest are functional programming, distributed systems & ethnobotany.

Currently he is Co-founder/CTO at Helpshift.

You can contact him on @ghoseb or b.ghose@freegeek.in

Fees and Registration

The event is on 24-25 August, from 9:30am to 5pm, at BMC Software, SB Road, Pune.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Seats are limited, so please register here fast.

About the PuneTech Calendar

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