Tag Archives: barcamps

Call for Proposals: Pune Scala Symposium 12 April

On April 12th, Thoughtworks Pune will play host to a day-long conference on Scala in Pune, and the call for proposals is now up. Here are some examples of topics that you can submit talks on:

  • experience reports from commercial projects (what worked, what did not and insights from implementing Scala on the project)
  • experience reports contributing to open source projects or consulting projects
  • demo/introduction to a library/tool/framework/technique

Propose a session now!

If your talk gets accepted, ThoughtWorks will sponsor your travel (domestic) and stay.

Who should attend:

If you are an existing user of Scala or other functional programming languages or if you are curious to know more about Scala and want to find out how other companies are using Scala, come join the Pune Scala Symposium. You will get to meet Scala enthusiasts from across India, discuss and learn from each other.

Venue:

ThoughtWorks India Pvt Ltd, 6th Floor, Binarius Building, Deepak Complex, National Games Road, Beside Sales Tax Office, Shastrinagar, Yerwada, Pune.

Follow @punescala on twitter, and join in the conversation using #punescala.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://info.thoughtworks.com/pune-scala-symposium-april-12-registration.html.

Food and refreshment drinks will be provided. Attendance is free of charge. Seats are limited, so sign up now!

If you have any questions write to punescala@thoughtworks.com or you can reach out to Mushtaq Ahmed on +919850099687.

FUDCon – Conference for Fedora Linux Users and Developers – 4-6 Nov

Abhijit A.M. of CoEP writes:

We are very pleased to invite you to FUDCON’11 (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) to be hosted in CoEP from 4th (Fri) to 6th (Sun) of Nov 2011. FUDCON is one of the world’s biggest Free and Open Source (FOSS) conferences. Fedora itself is one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions. The event is being organized by the Fedora Community, sponsored by and in association with Dept. of Computer Engg and IT, CoEP and Red Hat, Inc. The event is open, and free for all to attend ! Please visit the FUDCon website for details.

FUDCON is the meeting place for Fedora developers, but in line with all FOSS conferences, the talks are always targeted to educate people on various FOSS technologies. So it is a unique opportunity for all the students to get exposed to a variety of state of the art technologies in FOSS domain. The bigger opportunity lies in getting a chance to meet and chat with some of the prolific programmers from all around the world. Here is the list of talks

Speakers and delegates will be visiting from many parts of the world for FUDCON. Please note that the sessions will be held in Barcamp style which is quite unconventional and different from the way regular conferences are conducted. The style is the one FOSS community works with. To get a better idea of the talks, please visit the FUDCon website and get yourself registered (Free of course!)

CloudCamp: Cloud-computing (un-)Conference – 3 Sept

CloudCamp http://cloudcamp.org/pune is coming to Pune this Saturday (September 3rd)! Sponsors include not only big companies and organizations like IBM, Microsoft, but also Pune-startup PubMatic.

CloudCamp will have a mix of invited speakers and barcamp style last-minute speaker. Talks include:

  • “Integrating Public/Private Cloud” by Vijay Sukthankar, Cloud Computing Leader at IBM
  • BigData use in Advertising by Anand Das of PubMatic
  • “Platform-as-a-Service” by TBD of Microsoft
  • “CloudWorkshop – Does your app belong in the Cloud?” by Larry Carvalho of RobustCloud

For a detailed schedule and other information see the CloudCamp website. The event is at VITS hotel, near Balewadi Stadium, from 9:30am to 4pm.

Fees and Registration

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

Mini DebConf – Conference for Linux Enthusiasts – 13 Aug

Mini DebConf is a developer conference for those interested in Debian Linux (which is also the Linux Distribution on which Ubuntu is based). The purpose of the conference is:

  • Introduce the Debian Project to new users and potential contributors.
  • Introduce some of the technologies that Debian uses which could benefit new contributors.
  • Hands on sessions to learn debian tools and processes.
  • Start working on projects with the help of experienced developers.
  • Sharing Skills and discussing how the overall FOSS movement be taken forward.

Mini DebConf conferences are being held across cities in India. This weekend it is coming to Pune. MiniDebConf Pune is scheduled to start on 13th August 2011 at Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Bibwewadi, Pune.

On 13th there will be a series of talks and discussions introducing Debian. Second day will have hands on workshop sessions to teach creating debian packages. Third day will be a practical session of things they have learned on previous days. There will be cricket sessions in the evening. There is also a gpg key signing party on third day.

Sessions start at 10 am and last till 5pm every day. Complete schedule is available from event website

Chamba Mukt Cinema Project and Diaspora Decentralized Social Networking Project will have their booths at the conference venue. Debian, Chamba and Diaspora T Shirts will be available for purchase at the venue.

Organizers

  • VALU (VIT Active Linux Users)
  • COFSUG (COEP Free Software Users Group)

Please check http://wiki.debian.org/DebianIndia/MiniDebConf2011/FAQ if you you have any questions, or send a mail to minidebconf.india@gmail.com.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

Fees and Registration

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

Event: Knowledge Camp – 9th April

There are 6 different tech/startup related events happening in Pune this Saturday (see PuneTech Calendar for details). Yesterday, we wrote about DevCamp which is being held in Thoughtworks. Today, we bring you information about Knowledge Camp, which is being held in I2IT. They are both very similar events, with the difference that DevCamp is more likely to be interesting to hard-core developers, while Knowledge Camp will be interesting to a more general audience.

Knowledge Kamp is the variant of BarCamp, which is a free event, and it is all about learning, knowledge and experience sharing. Knowledge Kamp is going to be a semi-organized un-conference where participants would discuss and share knowledge / ideas / suggestions about Emerging Technology, Software, Networking, Management, Innovation, Web, Opensource, Entrepreneurship, Social Cause etc. (just anything which gives knowledge…) by giving sessions, personal interaction and there will be pre-scheduled sessions by experts across industry.

Why?

  • To offer a platform to individuals for Sharing Knowledge / Ideas
  • Bridging the gap between student and industry (Interaction among students, industry professionals & professors)
  • Open Networking
  • Open Learning Experience
  • Building Community

Who can participate?

Anyone with something to Share or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to this Knowledge Kamp

Partial List of Speakers:

  • Self awareness a need for young minds – by Mr. Girish Kelkar , President , PMI pune chapter
  • Mind Programming – by Mr. Vikas Dikshit , NLP-Huna Expert
  • Session on Tips and tricks for interview by Mr. Rajeev Joshi , Delivery Manager, Tech Mahindra
  • Leadership and what it takes to a human being – by Dr. Mahesh Deshmukh , Certified Master Coach
  • Session on Cloud Computing by Mr. Dhirender Nirwani, IBM
  • Security In Social Networks – by Mr. Niranjan Reddy, Cyber Crime Expert – Pune Police
  • Session on LTE (4G) by Mr. Tridib Bhattacharjee, Chief Mentor, Astramind Consulting
  • Session on SAP by Mr. Madhu Iyer
  • Session on SOA & SM by Dr. Atanu Rakshit, I2IT

Details

Knowledge Camp will be on Saturday, 9th April 2011, from 9:00am to 5:30pm at International Institute of Information Technology (I2IT), Phase I, Hinjewadi.

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

For more details contact: Saumil 9579624150 or drop a mail to knowledgekamp@isquareit.ac.in

Event: DevCamp – April 9

There are 6 different tech/startup related events happening in Pune this Saturday (see PuneTech Calendar for details). One of them is DevCamp which is being held in Thoughtworks. (Tomorrow, we’ll write about Knowledge Camp, which is being held in I2IT. They are both very similar events, with the difference that DevCamp is more likely to be interesting to hard-core developers, while Knowledge Camp will be interesting to a more general audience.)

Saager Mhatre writes about DevCamp:

DevCamp is an un-conference by the hackers, for the hackers and of the hackers. It is a species of BarCamp where software (code) and the construction thereof (hacking) is the core theme. The camp is a derivative of Open Space Technology and Barcamp and these roots are clearly visible in its unstructured approach and in that we subscribe to the The Law of Two Feet.

The very first DevCamp was put together a little over three years ago, and we’ve had a lot of fun taking this event to Chennai and then bringing it here to Pune. We hope to keep this trend going and see more local DevCamps sprouting.

The first DevCamp Pune of the year is on Saturday, the 9th of April 2011. Registrations are free and open to all, just add your details to the wiki at http://devcamp.in/index.php/Pune/2011/1/Registrations. The event is primarily sponsored by ThoughtWorks and will be hosted at their office in Yerawada, Pune[http://bit.ly/fvzJxG]. Global online monetization solutions provider Playspan has also chipped in this year.

Sessions at DevCamp assume a high level of exposure and knowledge on the part of your audience. We avoid ‘Hello World’ and how-to sessions which can be trivially found on the web. First hand war stories, in-depth analysis of topics and live demos are encouraged. Most sessions tend to be about 40 minutes long, plus 10 minutes for questions. Really popular talks can continue in the conference rooms and open spaces around the venue. We also run a stream of Lightning Talks, brisk 15 minute sessions that could spark off interesting discussions into the open spaces. This year we are also planning on a few Workshops in the event where campers can build and showcase interesting code around specific themes.

Topics discussed at the camp cover a wide range of subjects within the sphere of hacking. Here’s a small sampling of talks from previous events.

You can check out some of the sessions proposed for the upcoming event on our Proposals page and feel free to add some of your own!

To get updates about this and future DevCamps in Pune subscribe to our forum (https://groups.google.com/group/devcamp-pune). You can also track the DevCamp series on Lanyrd.

Joomla!Day India 2011 – Joomla conference in Pune on 12th March

Joomla!Day India 2011 is a large conference targeting developers, designers, administrators and users, Business owners & technologists as well as end users of the Joomla! Content Management System. For those who don’t know what Joomla! is, it is a software program that allows easy creation of very flexible, very customizable websites which can be administered and modified by non-technical end users. It is written in the PHP programming language.

Joomla!Day India is an annual conference and delegates will come from a range of public and private sectors, both national and international, in various markets, actively seeking information about Joomla! and other areas of web-based technology.

The list of speakers for this conference is rather impressive, and click here for the detailed schedule

Joomla!Day happens this weekend, 12th and 13th March, at Bajaj Gallery at 5th Floor of the ICC Trade Towers, SB Road. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Event Report – CloudCamp Pune

This report of the CloudCamp that was held in Pune last weekend, is a guest post by Chirag Jog, CTO of Clogeny Technologies

CloudCamp is an un-conference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. CloudCamp, encourages end users, IT professionals and vendors to participate and share their thoughts in several open discussions. Cloudcamp is organized in cities across the world .

CloudCamp Pune was held on 5th Feb 2011, hosted at Persistent Systems. The chief organizers were Shreekanth Joshi, Persistent Systems and Larry Carvalho, RobustCloud. The event was sponsored by Clogeny (only local/Pune-based sponsor), Netmagic, Trillion IT solutions, Microsoft Azure, Hexagrid and Tropo. NASSCOM was the in-kind sponsor.

The camp drew around 400+ registrations and around 150+ folks showed up for the conference making it the 3rd largest camp after Brazil and London. Larry Carvalho, was the coordinator on-stage.

Lightening Talks

As it typical of any event held in Pune, the crowd trickled till around 1045am and the event kicked off officially at 11am. Larry spoke first about Cloudcamp in general followed by which we had a bunch of lightning talks by all the sponsors. Persistent first spoke about the potential challenges customers will face while they try to migrate to the cloud. Trillion Tech followed talking more about the work Trillion Tech does than Cloud Computing. Interestingly they have deployed their private cloud offering in the US Federal Department of Treasury. Microsoft gave their regular Azure pitch where now folks can deploy non-.NET apps as well (like PHP/Python or Java based apps). Microsoft made quote: “SQL Azure is the only Relational DB in the cloud” – which is highly debatable. Clogeny, then gave their lightning talk about products they are working on namely building hybrid clouds and automated deployment platforms. Finally, Netmagic spoke about their Cloud offering. They aim to solve the compute problems of all India. Companies like Tata, Manipal Univ and India Infoline are some of the big customers the recently funded Netmagic have on their roster.

Suhas Kelkar, BMC representing NASSCOM gave a nice lightning talk about the UID project. One of the aims of the UID project is to provide “Identity as a Service”. Anyone around the world should be able to identify an Indian based on biometrics in less-than-2-seconds using a massive data de-duplication engine.

Larry gave 20:20 talk i.e. 20 slides in 20 secs per slide about general Cloud Computing concepts. Any Cloud solutions provided should be “OSSM” (pronounced awesome) – On demand, Self-Serviced and Measured. He explained basic Cloud Computing terms like PaaS, IaaS and SaaS

Cloud Computing Unpanel

Larry mentioned that he had heard complaints in the past that Indian Cloudcamps are less interactive and audience participation is really low. He tackled this problem very well with an un-panel discussion. Here is how it happened. He asked folks who were cloud experts to raise their hands. Around 15 or so raised their hands. He got all of them to come down to the main stage. After that, he started asking audience to “ask questions to these cloud experts.” He took down around
15-20 questions on white sheets of papers from the audience.

The “cloud experts” then answered all these questions. Some of the questions asked were about security concerns in the cloud, vendor lock-in, developer’s role, how to choose the right solution and so on. This was a fun session nicely organized by Larry ensuring audience participation.

Some of the questions asked and their answers:

  1. Security in the cloud: Security in the cloud is no different than securing your data centre. Ensure your network and host level firewalls are locked down and all communication is secure.
  2. Vendor lock-in: Everyone talks about the marriage but no one talks about the divorce i.e. moving away from a vendor. Design your applications properly so that migration from one vendor to another vendor is easy. One of the “cloud experts” mentioned how by designing a proper hibernate layer, they were able to move their Java application from Google App Engine to Amazon’s EC2 in a day. Design is the key.
  3. Application development for/in the cloud: Experts spoke about how quickly they could develop massively scalable applications using force.com’s platform-as-a-service.
  4. Making the right choices: Experts spoke about evaluating different offerings in terms of features and cost. Do a small POC before doing committing to a any vendor.
  5. Storage/Databases in the cloud: There are all sorts of databases (relational and non-relational i.e NoSQL ) available in the cloud which provide redundancy and consistency. e.g. Amazon’s S3, RDS, SQL Azure, MongoDB and so on.
  6. Will Network/System administrators lose their jobs? This was the question of the day raised by a lot. The answer is that your datacenter will become virtual but it will still exist and need regular maintenance. Platform-as-a-service solutions don’t provide a silver bullet that you can junk all your hardware capacity for that. You will need IaaS like Amazon EC2, Netmagic and that needs maintenance regularly.

Breakout Sessions

Post lunch, there were quite a few breakout sessions based on the audience questions asked before lunch. Larry himself conducted a session on Security in the Cloud. Janakiram MSV from Amazon, conducted a session on Migrating Applications to the Cloud. I attended Janakiram’s session. He spoke about his experiences in evaluating and then migration applications to the Cloud.

Some takeaways from Janakiram’s session:

  • Capex can go down significantly, but Opex needs to be tempered by revenue.
  • Steps to migrate into the cloud:
    • Do a cloud vendor assessment: Choose which vendor suits your current and future needs.
    • Do a simple Proof of Concept.
    • Migrate the data: Choose which part of the data (images, binary blobs etc) can use NoSQL databases and which parts are relational and need a Relational Database application.
    • Migrate the application: Either “forklift” the entire application and run it as-in the cloud or use a hybrid approach.
    • In the hybrid approach, some of your application’s context remains local while some is in the cloud and they communicate via shared queues or similar such ways.
  • Use Cloud vendor’s value added services besides compute and storage: eg. Leverage EC2’s queuing solution i.e Simple Queue Service instead of implementing your own.

  • Tweak as per the need: After running the application for a while in the cloud, keep tweaking your application for optimal use for resources.

I attended Netmagic’s demo. Netmagic gave a demo of their current cloud offering which is currently in beta. Similar to other popular cloud vendors, Netmagic lets you create Windows/Linux servers on the fly, connect them to remote storage, provides network level firewalls and provides proprietary software load-balancers. The UI was clean and easy to understand. Their SLA guarantees an uptime of 99.993%. Currrently, their solution looks very robust especially in the Indian market and there will offer a complete offering soon with APIs and connectors.

We (Kalpak Shah and myself) personally held a breakout session for developers and their role in the cloud. The main questions asked by developers were around “What and how do I develop in the cloud?”

The answers:

Application development fundamentally remains the same for the developer. You write code in Java, Python, .NET or any of your favorite languages. What changes is the environment in which is deployed and its use cases. e.g. If you want to host your Java Web application, instead of buying space from a hosting solution provider, deploy it directly into Google AppEngine (GAE). GAE will host it for you and scale up/down as per load. e.g. If you want to use scalable storage, your application will need to use a NoSQL storage solution like Amazon’s S3. The developer’s role here is to understand how to use S3’s APIs. Hence the developer would need to design and develop his application leveraging these “cloud” technologies.

Furthermore, the developer also would need to think “cloud” and design with multi-tenancy (a software application is designed to logically partition its data and configuration, and each client sees a custom version of that application) in mind for his Software-as-a-service offering. eg. Gmail or Facebook.

Conclusion

Larry closed the session by thanking the sponsors and participants. There was feedback about what all can be improved in the future. Key suggestions were: having talks about cloud basics in the beginning, having good net connectivity (for demos), and a post conference beer party (to ensure folks stick till the end).

All in all, CloudCamp is definitely a great un-conference if you want to learn about cloud, if you are an expert and what to share your experiences and knowledge, and if you have products to showcase.

The next CloudCamp in India is in Delhi (12th Feb) and Chennai (19th Feb).

About the Author – Chirag Jog

Chirag Jog is the CTO at Clogeny Technologies where they work on innovative ideas across the cloud computing stack. He, along with the CEO drives the overall strategy of the company. He is passionate about everything “cloud” and around it. He is an ex-PICTian.

CloudCamp Pune – Day long semi-unconference on Cloud Computing – 5th Feb

Cloud camp is a day-long event happening in Pune this Saturday. It is a semi-barcamp, in the sense that there are three tracks: 1 track of invited/sponsored talks and/or panels moderated by pre-determined speakers, 1/2 a track of demos by the event sponsors, and 1/2 a track of barcamp style talks. The detailed schedule is given below.

Cloud camp will be held on Saturday, 5th February, 10am to 6pm, at “Bhageerath”, Persistent Systems, SB Road.

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

Detailed Schedule

  • 10:00 am Registration & Networking
  • 10:30 am Welcome, Intros, and Thanks
  • 11:00 am Lightning Talks (5 minutes each)
    • Persistent Systems
    • TrillionTech
    • Microsoft
    • Clogeny
    • NetMagic
    • Nasscom
  • 11:45 am Unpanel
  • 12:30 pm Begin Open Spaces (organize the sessions)
  • 12:45 pm Lunch
  • 2:00 pm Open Spaces – Round 1
    • Migrating Applications to the Cloud – Strategy and Best Practices
      Moderated by Shreekanth Joshi and Janikaram MSV
    • To Be Decided(TBD) by audience (Library)
    • Demo by Trillion Technologies (Cafeteria)
  • 3:00 pm Open Spaces- Round 2
    • Can Cloud Computing level the playing field in India
    • TBD by audience (Library)
    • Demo by Microsoft Windows Azure (Cafeteria)
  • 4:00 pm Open Spaces- Round 3
    • How are Entrepreneurs Leveraging Cloud Computing (Moderated by Shaloo Shalini)
    • TBD by audience (Library)
    • Demo by NetMagic (Cafeteria)
  • 5:00 pm Wrap-up Session
  • 5:30 pm End

Organizers:

  • Shreekanth Joshi, Persistent Systems
  • Larry Carvalho, RobustCloud

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