Category Archives: Events

Pune IT Milan Seminar – An introduction to IT for college (FY/SY) students

Events, ,

Every year, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh organizes the Pune IT Milan Seminar, a two day program for college students (first and second year students of any degree course – not necessarily Computer Science or Info Tech courses). Many of the talks are in Marathi or Hindi, so that students who are not yet completely comfortable in English can also benefit. There are competitions, overview talks, and discussions on how to go about learning any topic or skill in today’s connected world, and on specific areas like web development, mobile development, sysadmin and networking.

See the full schedule for more details.

The event is on Saturday, 8th January, 2pm-6pm, and continues on Sunday, 9th January, from 8am to 1:30pm. It will be at “Motibag”, Shaniwar Peth. There’s an entry fee of Rs. 50 (which includes a snack and lunch). Register here if you’re interested in attending.

Innovations 2011 Contest: What product/services can the tech community build for Pune

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Update: The contest is over. Winners and Judges comments are:

  • Satish Tilokchandani: “Good News Reporter”. Comments: A simple idea that could really catch on if done well. And can spread beyond Pune too.
  • Hemanshu Narsana: “Transportation Options Calculator”. Comments: Would be really useful if it included estimated rickshaw fares, and 6-seater routes.
  • Dhanashree Srivastava: “RFID tags for kids”. Utility is limited to only certain contexts, but an interesting project for students/techies to work on.

On Saturday, 8th January, Pune will again play host to a number of innovative inventors from across the country, as part of Innovations 2011, an event organized by the IIT-Bombay Alumni Association, Pune Chapter. This event showcases the best science and technology innovations in India (whether they are from startups, large companies, or elsewhere) that have been implemented in practice. The innovations are from varied fields such as medicine, agriculture, mechanical/electronic/chemical technology, IT products, etc. Here are some example innovations from previous years:

  • a simple mechanical device that prevents toilets in Indian trains from discharging waste products at a station (i.e. when a train is stationary), but opens up when the train is moving over 40mph
  • a health alert emergency system for senior citizens, to be worn on the body, and which can automatically detect if they’ve fallen, and can alert emergence response systems
  • a solar powered pivot irrigation by a lone inventor
  • an integrated system for ethanol production from sorghum, by Pune’s Praj Industries,
  • wi-fi security by AirTight networks,
  • stem cell therapy for pre-eclampsia

This year, again the event promises to be great. The keynote address is being given by Chetan Maini, CTO of Reva Electric Vehicles (which is now a Mahindra & Mahindra company). For more details of the event schedule see here.

Register here if you wish to attend. There is an entry price – Rs. 750 (with dinner), or Rs. 500 (without dinner).

Every year, Innovations holds a contest where PuneTech readers have a chance to win free passes for Innovations.

The contest this year is this:

Briefly describe a product or service that the tech community can design, develop and deploy for the benefit of the citizens of Pune.

The basic idea is this: there are lots of enthusiastic techies in the tech community in Pune, and we could easily harness their energies to build some great products that can benefit Pune. It could be some simple Question and Answer website like ForPune.com, or something more complicated. It need not necessarily be a InfoTech idea; could be anything else.

The entries will be judged on the basis of these factors:

  • Usefulness: How much does it benefit the citizens of Pune? How much does it benefit society?
  • Ease of implementation: How much effort will it take to implement. The easier it is to implement, the more the chances of winning. For example, any idea that requires the “co-operation” of PMC, or some other government body, has a low chance of being implemented successful, and hence a low chance of winning. (On the other hand, an idea that requires the co-operation of Pune Traffic Police will get higher marks because PTP has been pretty fabulous last year at implementing innovative IT based ideas)
  • Uniqueness: The more “innovation” your idea has, the more different/unique it is from anything else we’ve seen before, the higher marks it gets.

Please describe your idea in brief in the comments section below. The last date for submitting ideas is Thursday, 6th January, 12 noon. Winners will be announced by Friday, 7th Jan. If you’ve already bought a ticket for Innovations, and you win the contest, your ticket price will be refunded. If you don’t actually want the ticket, or if you’re happy to pay the price (which is rather reasonable), you can still enter the contest – simply indicate at the end of your entry that you’re not interested in the ticket. Please ensure that you give correct email address with your comment – so we can contact you if you’ve won.

There will be 3 winners.

MIT (USA) and COEP to hold 5-day design & innovation workshop in Pune – Jan 24-29

Events, ,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Lab and College of Engineering Pune (CoEP) will host a five-day design and innovation workshop in the city from January 24 to 28.

This workshop aims to engage and inspire students across all disciplines in Indian universities in inventing the future. The week-long workshop will engage students in ideation, design, and implementation of prototypes together with Media Lab and local mentors.

The workshop will culminate in a plenary conference and exhibition that will be open to visitors from academia, industry leaders, and the media. The Media Lab culture of research involves working closely with industry and we believe this workshop will offer participants and attendees a flavor of how the Media Lab “invents the future.”

The workshop is free for COEP stduents, and students from partner institutions. Other students have to pay Rs. 2000, and industry applicants have to pay Rs. 10000. Normally, PuneTech does not feature paid events, but we are making an exception this case, since this event seems rather unique, and also it is free for at least some PuneTech readers.

The keynote speakers will be Prof Joseph Paradiso, Prof. Ramesh Raskar (remote), Pranav Mistry (remote), of sixth-sense fame. There will be tracks on living mobile, hacking pixels, media recrafted and living with machines. Detailed background information about the instructors can be found here.

The idea is that about 120 students will participate and four teams would be chalked out with 30 participants in each team. The teams will interact, brain storm and would present around five projects.

For more details see http://india.media.mit.edu/workshops/coep2011/.

LiveBlog #tw5: Intro to Functional Programming & Why it’s important

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This is a live-blog of TechWeekend 5 on Functional Programming. Please keep checking regularly, this will be updated once every 15 minutes until 1pm.

Why Functional Programming Matters by Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay Nene started off with an introductory talk on FP – what it is, and why it is important.

FP is a language in which functions have no side-effects. i.e., the result of a function is purely dependent on its inputs. There is no state maintained.

Effects/Implications of “no side effects”

  • Side-effects are necessary: FP doesn’t mean completely side-effect free. If you have no side-effects, you can’t do IO. So, FP really means “largely side-effect free”. Specifically, there are very few parts of the code that have side-effects, and you know exactly which those are.
  • Testability: Unit Testing becomes much easier. There are no “bizarre interactions” between different parts of the code. “Integration” testing becomes much easier, because there are no hidden effects.
  • Immutability: There are no “variables”. Once a value has been assigned to a ‘name’, that value is ‘final’. You can’t change the value of that ‘name’ since that would be ‘state’ and need ‘side-effects’ to change it.
  • Lazy Evaluation: Since a function always produces the same result, the compiler is free to decide when to execute the function. Thus, it might decide to not execute a function until that value is really needed. This gives rise to lazy evaluation.
  • Concurrency control is not so much of a problem. Concurrency control and locks are really needed because you’re afraid that your data might be modified by someone else while you’re accessing it. This issue disappears if your data is immutable.
  • Easier parallelization: The biggest problem with parallelizing programs is handling all the concurrency control issues correctly. This becomes a much smaller problem with FP.
  • Good for multi-core: As the world moves to multi-core architectures, more and more parallelism will be needed. And humans are terrible at writing parallel programs. FP can help, because FP programs are intrinsically, automatically parallelizable.

Another important feature of functional programming languages is the existence of higher order functions. Basically in FP, functions can be treated just like data structures. They can be passed in as parameters to other functions, and they can be returned as the results of functions. This makes much more powerful abstractions possible. (If you know dependency injection, then higher-order functions are dependency injection on steroids.)

FP gives brevity. Programs written in FP will typically be much shorter than comparable imperative programs. This is probably because of higher-order functions and clojures. Compare the size of the quicksort code in Haskell vs. Java at this page

You need to think differently when you start doing functional programming.

Think different:

  • Use recursion or comprehensions instead of loops
  • Use pattern matching instead of if conditions
  • Use pattern matching instead of state machines
  • Information transformation instead of sequence of tasks
  • Software Transactional Memory FTW!

Advantages of FP:

  • After initial ramp-up issues, development will be faster in FP
  • Code is shorter (easier to read, understand)
  • Clearer expression of intention of developer
  • Big ball of mud is harder to achieve with pure functions. You will not really see comments like “I don’t know why this piece of code works, but it works. Please don’t change it.”
  • Once you get used to FP, it is much more enjoyable.
  • Faster, better, cheaper and more enjoyable. What’s not to like?

The cost of doing FP:

  • Re-training the developers’ brains (this is a fixed cost). Because of having to think differently. Can’t just get this from books. Must do some FP programming.
  • You can suffer from a lack of third-party libraries(?), but if you pick a language like Clojure which sits on the JVM, then you can easily access java libraries for the things that don’t exist natively in your language.

Should a company do it’s next project in a functional programming language? Dhananjay’s recommendation: start with small projects, and check whether you have the organizational capacity for FP. Then move on to larger and larger projects. If you’re sure that you have good programmers, and there happens to be a 6-month project for which you’re OK if it actually becomes a 12-month project, then definitely do it in FP. BG’s correction (based on his own experience): the 6-month project will only become a 8-month project.

Some things to know about Erlang by Bhasker Kode

Bhasker is the CEO of http://hover.in. They use Erlang in production for their web service.

Erlang was created in 1986 by developers at Ericsson for their telecom stack. This was later open-sourced and is now a widely used language.

Erlang is made up of many “processes”. These are programming language constructs – not real operating system processes. But otherwise, they are similar to OS processes. Each process executes independently of other processes. Processes do not share any data. Only message passing is allowed between processes. There are a number of schedulers which schedule processes to run. Normally, you will have as many schedulers as you have cores on your machine. Erlang processes are very lightweight.

Garbage collection is very easy, because as soon as a process dies, all its private date can be garbage collected because this is not shared with anyone else.

Another interesting thing about Erlang is that the pattern matching (which is used in all functional programming languages) can actually match binary strings also. This makes it much easier to deal with binary data packets.

Erlang has inbuilt support and language features for handling failures of processors, and which process takes over the job and so on, supervisor processes, etc.

Erlang allows you to think beyond for loops. Create processes which sit around waiting for instructions from you. And then the primary paradigm of programming is to send a bunch of tasks to a bunch of processes in parallel, and wait for results to come back.

Some erlang applications for developers:

  • Webservers built in erlang: Yaws, mochiweb, nitrogen, misultin
  • Databases built in erlang: amazon simpledb, riak, couch, dynomite, hibari, scalaris
  • Testing frameworks: distil, eunit, quickcheck, tsung

Who is using erlang? Amazon (simpledb), Facebook (facebook chat), microsoft, github, nokia (disco crawler), ea (the games company), rabbitmq (a messaging application), ejabberd (the chat server, which has not crahsed in 10 years). Indian companies using erlang: geodesic, http://hover.in.

How Clojure handles the Expression Problem by Baishampayan Ghose

If you’ve gone deep into any programming language, you will find a reference to lisp somewhere. So, every programmer must be interested in lisp. To quote Eric Raymond:

LISP is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot.

BG had conducted a 2 day Clojure tutorial in Pune a few months back, and he will happily do that again if there is enough interest. This talk is not about the basics of Clojure. It is talking about a specific problem, and how it is solved in Clojure, in the hope that it gives some interesting insights into Clojure.

Clojure is a dialect of lisp. And the first thing that anybody notices about lisp is all the parantheses. Don’t be afraid of the parantheses. After a few days of coding in lisp, you will stop noticing them.

Clojure has:

  • first-class regular expressions. A # followed by a string is a regular expression.
  • arbitrary precision integers and doubles. So don’t worry about the data-type of your numbers. (It internally uses the appropriately sized data types.)
  • code as data and data as code. Clojure (and lisp) is homoiconic. So lisp code is just lists, and hence can be manipulated in the program by your program to create new program constructs. This is the most ‘difficult’ and most powerful part of all lisp based languages. Google for “macros in lisp” to learn more. Most people don’t “get” this for a long time, and when they “get” lisp macros, the suddenly become very productive in lisp.
  • has a nice way to attach metadata to functions. For example, type hints attached to functions can help improve performance
  • possibility of speed. With proper type-hints, Clojure can be as fast as Java

_(Sorry: had to leave the talk early because of some other commitments. Will try to update this article later (in a day or two) based on inputs from other people.)

Clojure, Erlang, & Functional Programming – Intro to FP & Why It’s Important – TechWeekend5 18 Dec

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Have you heard of Clojure, Erlang, Scala, F# and wondered why people are getting all excited about these new fangled languages? Then this is your chance to find out. And if you are a programmer or are otherwise working in the software technology space and have not heard any of those names, then you need to start reading more, and you certainly need to attend this TechWeekend5 in Pune this Saturday. Register for the event here.

Vayana Services and TechWeekend Pune presents a detailed session on Functional Programming this Saturday, 18th December from 10am to 1pm, at Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, MCCIA in ICC Trade Tower (A Wing, Ground floor), S.B. Road. You must attend.

Object-Oriented Programming is now passe, and all the cool kids (i.e. the star programmers) have started looking very seriously at functional programming languages like Clojure and Erlang. The more visionary ones (like our speakers this week: Dhananjay Nene, Bhasker Kode, and Baishampayan Ghose) are building the next generation of products in these languages.

Find out the What, the Why and the How on Saturday.

There will be three talks, listed below, and some time for general discussions around this topic.

Why you should care about functional programming – by Dhananjay Nene

This talk will focus on important characteristics of functional programming and the current landscape in terms of variety of languages and its adoption. The talk will also refer to how leveraging it can help you in terms of brevity, concurrency, better abstractions, testability, economics and particularly enjoyability. A small part of the talk will also focus very superficially on the Scala programming language.

About the Speaker – Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay is a passionate programmer and a consulting software architect. He loves to learn, research, prototype and deploy new technologies and languages even as he is strongly focused on ensuring that the choices are made consistent with the business objectives and landscape. He currently writes code for and advises Vayana Enterprises in his role as its Chief Architect.

An Introduction to Erlang – by Bhasker Kode

While ideating hover.in towards the end of 2007 Bhasker soon become an ardent evangelist of Erlang and it’s fault tolerant nature traditionally intended for use in telecom & messaging circles. Following it’s rising use in building real-time and low-latency applications at web scale Bhasker has presented Hover’s erlang growth stories at Commercial Users of Functional Programming Conference in Edinburgh along with Facebook, Erlang Factory in London, and Foss.in in Bangalore talking about the role of functional programming. Hover’s engineering efforts can be tracked at http://developers.hover.in

About the Speaker – Bhasker Kode

Bhasker is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pune-based Hover Technologies, a user-engagement platform that allows web publishers to add a new channel of earning ad revenue through the use of in-text “tooltip” based ads. He has always been captured by the potential of the internet as part of the core team behind several destination portals and startups from his college days in Chennai. His introduction to functional programming came from his stint as the first few developers at Bangalore based Tutorvista where he built the calendar, syndication, whiteboard among other products used by thousands across the world everyday.

Clojure & its solution to the Expression Problem – Baishampayan Ghose

The “Expression Problem” arises when we want to add new functionality to a library that we don’t control. Most popular programming languages accomplish this task by Monkey Patching, Wrapper Classes, etc. In this talk, BG will discuss the demerits of traditional approaches to the problem and how Clojure solves this problem using Protocols. This talk is intended to show-off the real power of Clojure in solving complex problems.

BG has chosen to talk about a particular feature of Clojure in depth instead of skimming over many things in a hurry because he believes that Clojure’s approach to solving the Expression Problem clearly demonstrates the thought process that has gone into designing the language and shows how it’s different from most other programming languages. I will also cover the very basics of reading Clojure code in just a few minutes which will also demonstrate the simplicity of the language itself.

About the Speaker – Baishampayan Ghose

Baishampayan Ghose (mostly known as BG) is the co-founder & CTO of http://Paisa.com. He has been a career Functional Programmer and has programmed professionally in Common Lisp, Clojure & now Erlang.

About the Sponsor – Vayana Services

Vayana Services offers an easier option for small and medium enterprises to obtain working capital financing from banks by electronically sourcing, transferring and tracking digitally signed trade documents across trading parties and banks. It is a financial service backed by a cloud based offering with its development and operations management team based in Pune. With a strong belief that healthy businesses are greatly assisted by using healthy technology, Vayana Services looks forward to an increasingly frequent and high quality interaction within the software technology community in Pune and welcomes you all to Techweekend 5.

Logistics

This event is free for all to attend, but please register here. The event is in MCCIA’s Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, ICC Towers, Wing A, Ground Floor. From 10am-1pm. The hashtag for the event is #tw5

DevCon2010 – Pune Microsoft Technologies User Groups Annual Developer Conference – 18/19 Dec

Events,

The Pune (Microsoft Technologies) User Group is a very active forum for developers who work with Microsoft products. In addition to regular events, they also have an annual conference which is attended by a very large number of people.

This year, DevCon 2010 will be held on 18th and 19th December, at MCCIA Trade Tower, Room 505, in the A-Wing, on 5th Floor. This is at the ICC convention center at S.B. Road. It goes from 9am to 5:30pm on both days.

This event is free for all to attend, but you need to register.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any other information about the event – the schedule, the sessions, the speakers, because the conference website is in Silverlight which I don’t have installed. But if you are interested in Microsoft Technologies, then you probably don’t want to miss this event.

Wikipedia & Indian Developers – Wikimedia/Mediawiki meetup in Pune – 13 Dec

External Visitors,

Erik Möller, Danese Cooper, and Alolita Sharma, all senior members of the Wikimedia Foundation (the “NGO” behind Wikipedia) are visiting Pune, and a meeting has been organized for everyone interested in Wikipedia to meet them and talk about the product strategy, especially in reference to India and Indian developers.

What’s Wikimedia? What’s Mediawiki?

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit charitable organization behind Wikipedia and a bunch of other “crowdsourced” reference websites like: Wiktionary (a dictionary), Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikinews, etc. These are the guys who collect money to keep the Wikipedia and all other projects running, and also pay for the development and maintainence of the software, servers, and other things.

Mediawiki is the software that Wikipedia uses. This is basically an open source “wiki” software written in PHP. It can be freely downloaded by anyone who wishes to host a wiki with features similar to Wikipedia. For example, the PuneTech wiki also runs on Mediawiki software.

Visitors’ details

  • Erik Möller, Deputy Directory, Wikimedia Foundation, also responsible for product strategy
  • Danese Cooper, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation
  • Alolita Sharma, Engineering Programs Manager, Wikimedia Foundation, manages the features development team
  • (Maybe) Bishakha Datta, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation might also join them (not yet confirmed)

They are all doing a tour of India (Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore)…

Agenda for the Meeting

The purpose of the meeting is to get in touch with India’s engineering and open source community. The key questions they’re hoping to explore include:

  • Localization issues concerning Indic languages
  • Other MediaWiki improvements that would make the sites more useful in India
  • Improvements to the mobile gateway
  • Potential partners in developing and deploying offline versions of Wikimedia content.

Logistics

Date: Monday, 13 December, 6:30pm
Venue: SICSR, Model Colony, 7th Floor
Registration: This meeting is free and open for all to attend. No registration is required.

How to get your event promoted on PuneTech

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The PuneTech calendar is the most comprehensive source of information about tech events happening in Pune. And, with a large focused readership, PuneTech is a great way to provide publicity to your event. In this post, we provide guidelines on how to get your event promoted on PuneTech.

There are two different ways in which an event can be promoted on PuneTech. The first is to get listed in the PuneTech calendar. This is easy, and anybody can do it. The second is to get listed on the PuneTech main page. This is more difficult, and is subject to selection by PuneTech editors. Details on how to submit your event for these two listings is given below.

Adding an event to the PuneTech Calendar

To add an event to the PuneTech Calendar, follow these steps:

  • Add your event to Yahoo Upcoming. To do this, click on this link and then fill out the form in as much detail as possible.
  • Note: you will need to sign in using your yahoo ID. If you don’t have a yahoo ID, you’ll have to create one.
  • Don’t forget to indicate whether the event is free or paid.
  • If registration or RSVP is required for the event, please include information about how to do that. If no registration is required, please say so explicitly. (Otherwise we get mails from people asking us how to register for the event.)
  • Remember to click “Preview Event”, followed by “Submit”.
  • After the event has been created, send us the link via email to punetech@punetech.com and we’ll add it to the PuneTech calendar.

Requirements:

  • The event must be in Pune, and must be a technology event. (We sometimes relax this condition if we feel that enough of our readers might be interested.)
  • The event must be a real, physical, offline event. No webinars/webcasts or other online events
  • Did we mention that the event must be in Pune? No Mumbai/Hyderabad events. (Yes, we routinely reject requests to list events from other cities.)
  • Listing of paid events/trainings is allowed, but only if the price is clearly indicated.

Remember to send an email to punetech@punetech.com with the link after you’re done.

Featuring your event on the PuneTech main page

Events that we find particularly interesting are posted to the PuneTech main page. This gives much wider coverage to the event. In addition to being seen by all the visitors to the website, it also goes automatically to the 2500 “subscribers” of PuneTech who get the latest PuneTech news via RSS or email. It also shows up on http://punetech.com/category/events/ and is sent to the @punetech twitter account.

To get your event promoted to the main page, you need to first add it to the PuneTech calendar (by following instructions in the previous section), and then send us an email suggesting that we promote it to our main page. Here are the rules:

  • Only free events or events that charge a nominal fee are considered for inclusion on the main page. Specifically, any event that charges more than Rs. 1000 is definitely not promoted. Events charging less might be considered, based on interestingness of the event.
  • Adding the event to the PuneTech Calendar with all details filled out properly significantly improves your chances of being promoted. You could try sending us an email with just the event details, but without adding it to the PuneTech Calendar. But that significantly increases the time and effort required on our part to add the event. And then, since we’re doing this in our free time, for free, we might or might not get around to it depending upon how busy we are.
  • Please make sure that the “Description” is filled in detail using plain text. Just a link to an image or a PDF is not good enough. (We can’t cut-n-paste text from images, and we’ll probably not feature events for which we cannot give a good text description.)
  • Promotion to the main page is based on various subjective criteria, including “interestingness”. There are no guarantees. You sends us an email, and you takes your chances.

Suggestions/comments/feedback? Let us know in the comments below.

5 Tech Events in Pune this Saturday (this is no longer surprising)

Events

There are five tech events in Pune this Saturday. ClubHack (security), DocType HTML5 (html5/css3), POCC Networking Event (startups), PLUG monthly meet (Linux), and ACM Pune Event (Indiana University pitch). In the past, this would have been cause for celebrations – but it is no longer surprising. We now regularly have days that are full of tech events. November 19 and November 12 both had 5 events each.

About 2-1/2 years ago, when PuneTech and Pune Open Coffee Club were started, we used to worry about scheduling an event on a day when there was already another event on the same day. We would get vaguely uncomfortable if a POCC meeting was scheduled on the same day as a PLUG monthly meet – why force Pune techies to choose between two events? In those days, we had the luxury of thinking like this, because, on an average, there would be 3 or 4 tech events in a whole month!

How things changed. In the last 3 weeks alone, there have been 21 interesting events in Pune that we know about (I’m sure there were more). The tech community is thriving. There is so much to choose from. And yet, if we take into account the population of tech professionals and students in Pune, so much more could be done. Maybe we don’t need more events, but we can definitely do with more participation.

What we need to do:

  • Be more aware of what events are happening. In The PuneTech Calendar we try to list all the events we find out about. We don’t necessarily feature all of them in the PuneTech blog (i.e. in the daily email that you receive). So if you want to be informed of all the events, you need to separately subscribe to the events rss feed or email subscription.
  • Get more people to attend events. Spread the word. Encourage your friends to attend.
  • Start “doing” things in events, in stead of just “attending” and “listening”. We have such a thriving community – we should harness the spirit to start creating things. Maybe we can create websites that help the community, or the city. Maybe we can create interesting services. Maybe we can write mobile apps. Ideas are welcome.

In any case, check out the list of events. There’s a Rails Meetup today (but you’ll probably not be able to attend because they’re already full and have a waiting list of people wanting to get in). On Saturday, Bruce Schneier, renowned security expert will be at ClubHack (in addition to all the other speakers). HasGeek.in has collected together a bunch of experts in HTML5 to tell us why HTML5/CSS3 will take over the world. Pune Linux Users Group will be planning GNUnify, one of the biggest open source events in India, which will happen in Pune in February. And Dr. Bobby Schnabel, Dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University, USA, will tell us about the crucially important and stimulating challenges that lie before us in the areas of computing and information technology.

It’s a good time to be a techie in Pune…

DocType HTML5 – Free 1-day conference on html5/css in Pune – Dec 4

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DocType HTML5 is a one day conference on HTML5, CSS3 and related technologies. This is a free, technology-focused event aimed at helping folks get started with HTML5 as a rich application platform.

DocType HTML5 will be held in Pune this Saturday, December 4, from 9am to 6pm, at COEP (College of Engineering, Pune).

This is a free event, and anybody can attend. You need to register here

The first edition of DocType HTML5 was in Bangalore on October 9. A full report of that edition is available here. That should give you an idea of what the conference is about. The schedule and list of speakers for the Pune event haven’t yet been finalized, but the talks are likely to be similar. Each edition has a different set of speakers and is customized around the interests of participants. After you register, you will be asked to pick the topics you’re interested in. They will customize the sessions and find subject matter experts based on your choices.

About the Organizers – HasGeek.in

DocType HTML5 is organized by HasGeek, a new initiative focused on creating high quality community-driven technology events.

HasGeek was created by Kiran Jonnalagadda after he realized that technology events “by the community” could be improved significantly if someone else were to take over the job of logistics and of finding sponsorships. That way, the community could focus on the content. This is what HasGeek does. It is a private company that organizes the DocType HTML5 conference in various cities (and will presumably start organizing other tech conferences in the future). The conferences are free for anybody to attend, and HasGeek takes care of the logistics (venue, lunch, tea/coffee, registration) and getting enough sponsorships to pay for all of that.

What I really like about HasGeek is the professional way in which the it appears to be run. Poke around on the HasGeek wiki to understand what I mean. See the detailed updates on the feedback received from previous conferences. Look up the conference router project.

What should you do

If you would like to attend, register here.

If you would like to be a speaker get in touch with Kiran at HasGeek.in.