Tag Archives: Events

Event: DevCamp – April 9

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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.

Call for Speakers – IndicThreads Conference on Cloud Computing

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Pune’s http://IndicThreads.com, which organizes various conferences in Pune every year, has a call for speakers for their 2nd Conference On Upcoming Technologies to be held on 3rd and 4th June 2011 in Pune. The theme for this year is again Cloud Computing.

Look at these PuneTech posts (article 1, article 2) to get an idea of what last year’s conference was like. Look here for slides of all the talks last year.

If you’re an Industry Professional and have any experience with Cloud Computing, you’re encouraged to submit an abstract by March 31st April 10th. The suggested topics are:

  1. Cloud /Grid architecture
  2. Cloud-based Services and Education
  3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
  4. Software as a Service (SaaS)
  5. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
  6. Virtualization
  7. High-Performance Computing
  8. Cloud-Delivered Testing
  9. Cloud Lock-in vs. Cloud Interoperability
  10. Multi Cloud Frameworks & APIs
  11. Monitoring Cloud Applications
  12. Data Security & Encryption On The Cloud
  13. Elastic Computing
  14. Cloud Databases
  15. Private vs. Public Clouds
  16. Cloud Scalability
  17. Cloud Analytics

But don’t be limited by these choices.

Click here to submit a proposal. Remember the deadline is 31st March… and all you need to submit at this time, is a one paragraph abstract.

Upcoming Tech Events In Pune: Testing / Rails / Mobile Networks / e-Commerce

Events,

The PuneTech Calendar lists 7 different Tech Events in Pune over the next 3 days. And these are just the free events that are open for anybody to attend – we’re not even counting paid events (since it’s against PuneTech policy to promote events whose entry fees are more than Rs. 1000).

So, in order to simplify your life, and make it easier for you to choose, here is a handy guide to the events this week. The listing here just gives the name of the event, and reasons for why you should attend. For more details like venue, timing, and registration, check the full listing in PuneTech Calendar

Twestival Pune – 6pm, Today, 24 March – if you’re interested in Social Media and Charity, go to the 1st Brewhouse at the Corinthian Club (more popularly known as the Doolally microbrewery), pay Rs. 350 “cover charge” which goes towards charity, and in return you get 2 pints of beer, live screening of the India-Australia Cricket match, and a live band between innings.

Startup Founders, especially those who are working on commercializing a non-trivial technology innovation, can apply for funding (or even grants) from TePP, an entrepreneur promotion programme from the Government of India. Today, 24 March, 4pm-6pm, the Venture Center, at NCL, Pashan Road, will have an informational programme giving you an idea of what TePP is, and how to apply.

If you’re a quality assurance / testing professional, you should definitely attend vodQA Nite – The Testing Spirit night, on Saturday, 26 March, 11am to 2:30pm.

If you’re a Rails developer, you can attend the all night Pune Rails Hackfest which will go all night on Friday, starting at 6pm. (You don’t need to stay the whole night – can can leave whenever you’re tired or have had enough). Great place to meet the really serious Rails hackers in Pune.

If you’re doing eCommerce and worried about online payments over the internet (and all the associated problems for merchants in India), check out the “Amazon Global Payments Services” talk on Friday, March 25, 6pm, and also the “Setting up an ecommerce website using Paypal and Google Checkout” presentation on Saturday, March 26, 1pm.

And finally, if you are an entrepreneur in the Kothrud area, or you are someone else interested in the startup ecosystem (student who might want to join a startup instead of an established company, someone interested in starting a startup one day, or a service provider/vendor who’s interested in marketing to startups), go for POCC-Kothrud kickoff meeting, i.e. the meeting of the Kothrud branch of the Pune Open Coffee Club (Pune’s incredibly active, free, open forum for startups).

That’s what’s going on this weekend.

In addition, on Tuesday and Wednesday, for those interested in Chemical Science/Technology we have a distinguished visitor, Prof. CNR Rao, FRS, National Research Professor & Honorary President and Linus Pauling Research Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore. On Tuesday he is giving a talk “Chemical Science: Glorious Past & Exciting Future” and on Wednesday it is “The Man Who Did Not Get a Prize – a Story of Modern Chemistry”.

So, overall, a very active few days for us. So many events, so little time – what a good problem to have, right?

Note: The PuneTech main blog/feed/mailing list (i.e. what you are reading just now) does not always write about all the interesting events going on in Pune. If you want to know about everything, and you want to know well in advance, please subscribe to the PuneTech Calendar – get all PuneTech events sent to you via email or via RSS

TechWeekend 8: Web Development Frameworks – Rails, Grails, Django

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TechWeekend #8 (#tw8) this Saturday will focus on Web Development Frameworks. We have the following talks lined up, and one more is likely to get added in the next day or two

  • Grails, and other web development techniques in Groovy, by Saager Mhatre
  • Interesting new things in Rails3, by Gautam Rege
  • “A Django Case-Study: Use of advanced features of Django in http://wogma.com” by Navin Kabra. This talk will be structured in such a way that people who are not familiar with Python/Django might find the features interesting; while Django developers will be interested in how they were implemented in Django.

TW8 will be this Saturday, 19th March, from 10am to 2pm, at the Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, Ground Floor, A Wing, ICC Trade Center, SB Road.

About Techweekend

TechWeekend Pune is a volunteer run activity. TechWeekend talks are held on the 3rd Saturday of every month from 10am to 2pm at Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, Ground Floor, ICC Trade Center, SB Road. Each TechWeekend event features 3 or 4 talks on advanced technical topics. These events are free for all to attend. See PuneTech articles about past techweekends to get an idea of the events.

Join the techweekend mailing list to keep in touch with the latest TechWeekend activities.

About the Sponsor – Microsoft

Many thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the venue for Techweekend. Microsoft wants to get more closely involved with the tech community in Pune, and particularly the open source enthusiasts – with the intention of making everybody aware that their cloud technologies (like Azure) actually play well with open source, and that you can deploy your php applications, your drupal/joomla installs on Azure.

When, Where, How much

TechWeekend #8 will be on Saturday, 19th March, from 10am to 2pm, at Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, Ground Floor, Wing A, ICC Trade Center, SB Road.

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

PHPCamp – the biggest PHP conference in India – in Pune on 5th March

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PHPCamp is back.

PHPCamp is the biggest PHP conference in India and happens in Pune every year. Why should you go?

  • If you’re a student interested in web development, you should go to find out what’s going on with the most popular web development language in the world.
  • If you’re a motivated student who would like to do some interesting projects, and are looking for a mentor/guide/advisor from Industry, PHPCamp would be a good place to find some
  • If you’re a web developer and would like to interact with other passionate web developers and find out what interesting things they’re working on, then the hallway conversations at PHPCamp should attract you
  • If you’re a non-technical founder of a startup and are looking for technical co-founders, this is the place to be.
  • If you’re looking for a development partner, or a small company to which you’d like to outsource web development work, then PHPCamp is the place to find the most interesting ones

What is PHPCamp?

It is a barcamp for those interested in PHP. A barcamp is essentially a conference but without a pre-determined schedule or invited speakers. Anyone can attend. And on the morning of the conference, there is a whiteboard put up with all the open slots (for speaking), and anybody who has an interesting topic can write down their name and the topic and sign up as a speaker.

See the PHPCamp FAQ for more details.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. It’s on Saturday, 5th March, from 9:30am to 5pm, at SICSR, at model colony. Please register here.

Event Report: Startup Saturday Pune on Technology in Education

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(This report of the Feb 2011 Startup Saturday Pune, by Vishwa Vivek Garg, first appeared on eventNU, and is republished here with permission)

For the Feb 2011 Startup Saturday Pune on Technology in Education, we got speakers from IndicThreads, Millenium School/ myEshala, NextLeap, Synthesis Solutions & kPoint.

IndicThreads – Harshad Oak

It started with Harshad Oak of IndicThreads.

IndicThreads organizes tech conferences such as java, cloud computing, mobile computing, etc. As of now it is only within Pune but in long run they want to spread all across India. These conferences are paid and the overall response is good. Harshad used to work for Cognizant before he started (along with his wife) IndicThreads. He is basically a Java guy and got some renowned certifications. He also authored a Java book. While sharing his entrepreneurial journey, he mentioned that writing a book on Java helped him a lot starting his venture.

So do something & participate in various things so that people start recognizing you.

Millenium School – Nikhil Karkare

2nd presentation was from Nikhil Karkare of Millenium School. He talked about the concept of ‘no school bags’ for children of Millenium School. It is a day boarding, state board school where kid gets almost everything within the school campus. Kids don’t take any school bags to school. They give books/ copies within the school and kids practice it.

He mentioned that since the concept of no school bag was new, initially they faced some difficulty convincing the crowd.

A related query arised, “how do parents know what their kids are doing in the school?”. They daily send sheets of whatever their kids have done during the day.

He also talked about their learning tool called myEshala where they provide video CD to parents for the syllabus and child can practice it at home as well.

NextLeap – Suruchi Wagh

3rd presentation was from Suruchi Wagh of NextLeap.

NextLeap is a recommendation engine for students seeking admission in American universities. They work on freemium model where they suggest 3 universities free of cost. They have 2 other accounts called economy & advanced where they suggest more universities and support on phone as well.

They have 3 guys on advisory board and Alok Kejriwal of Games2Win/ Mobile2Win/ Contest2Win is one of them.

Synthesis Solutions – Swapnil Patil

4th presentation was from Swapnil Patil of Synthesis Solutions.

Swapnil talked about his new venture in education field called GetAdmission.in

kPoint – Avijit

Last presentation was from Avijit of kPoint.

kPoint is a product of GSLab (a soft. dev. comp.). It is a cloud-based solution for multimedia learning and sharing in fast moving organizations. kPoint enables easy capture of expert knowledge into multimedia kapsules, which provide searchable video and flexible navigation of content for informal learning. kPoint effectively overcomes the barrier for creating and sharing content.

With that we came to an end of the event and then participants networked with each other over cold-drink and snacks. It was a successful event with around 80-90 participants.

Next meet will focus on how to take your idea/ product into the market.

About the Author – Vishwa Vivek Garg

Vishwa has 11 yrs. of rich web development experience in which he has worked at various levels from software engineer to project manager. He has worked with startups as well as well-established software companies. He loves the startup culture and tries to help the ecosystem. He has managed startup meets in Pune, India for more than a year through Startup Saturday Pune Chapter.

Vishwa co-founded eventNu.com as a hobby project and it helps him understand various aspects of running a business. He is very hopeful that this will help him in his journey towards entrepreneurship.

He consults with startups on development and business strategy.

Event Report: TechWeekend Pune 7 – Mobile Application Development

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TechWeekend Pune 7, on Mobile Application Development was held on Saturday, 19th Feb. These are the live-tweets, collected here for your benefit. Remember, they are live-tweets that were being typed while the event was happening, so they’re not necessarily as coherent and as well-organized as a regular article.

Windows Phone 7 by Mayur Tendulkar

The first talk was by Mayur Tendulkar talking about Windows Phone 7

  • This talk is a basic overview of Windows Phone 7. Important now, because Nokia has now thrown its weight behind it.
  • “If windows is not behaving well, you format your drive and start again. MSFT did same with its Mobile OS. Win Phone 7 is completely new”
  • Mobile phone world suffers from large number of devices of different resolutions that behave differently. This is not true of Win Mobile 7. Windows Phone 7 insists on a standardized hardware & screen configuration. So your Win Phone 7 will always look and behave the same.
    • WinPhone7 screen config: 480×800 or 320×480. No other sizes allowed. S-LCD/AMOLED capacitive touchscreen. 4-point multi-touch
    • WinPhone7 will always have these sensors: A-GPS, proximity sensor, accelerometer, compass, light.
    • All WinPhone7 devices must have these three buttons: Start, Back, Search. (As usual, to shutdown, you press Start 🙂
  • App Development for WinPhone7: regular apps using Silverlight, and game apps using XNA.
    • “Silverlight is just like Flash”. Modern app UI framework. Apparently has 500,000 developers spanning windows, web (and now mobile)
    • Visit the Tata Nano site or the Hard Rock Cafe New York site to see some cool uses of Silverlight
    • The XNA framework for game development is mature and widely accepted – because it was in XBox 360, Windows and Zune.
  • WinPhone7 developers get all the goodness of Visual Studio for developing mobile apps with Visual Studio 2010 Express for WP.
  • Other developer tools: Silverlight Dev Kit. XNA Game Studio 4.0. Expression Blend 4.0. Also VB for WinPhone7.
  • All these development tools for WinPhone7 are free.

This was followed by a walk through of building a WinPhone7 app using Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight.

Some interesting audience Q&A:

  • Q: What languages are supported for WinPhone7 development? A: At this point, only Visual Basic and C#
  • Q: Does WinPhone7 support multi-tasking. A: No. Some standard system services can run in the background; but apps don’t multitask.

Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development by Rohit Ghatol

Next up: Rohit Ghatol talking about cross-platform mobile app development using phonegap, titanium etc.

  • Two ways of developing cross-platform apps. 1. Develop html5 apps for webkit. 2. Use a translator that translates your app to native code.
  • For now, all major mobile platforms have a webkit based browser (except WinPhone7). So writing an app targeting webkit is “cross-platform”
  • Q: Will a webkit based app work with WinPhone7? A: No. But Mango release of WinPhone7 will support html5, so you should be close.
  • Translating common codebase to different native apps – Titanium. Write in JavaScript, and translate to Native.
  • PhoneGap = HTML5 + CSS3 + JavaScript + special ability to make calls to access phone sensors etc.
    • Note: HTML5/CSS3 development for mobile apps works because all phone browsers are much more advanced on this issue than desktop browsers
    • Features supported by phonegap: accelerometer, camera, compass, contacts, file io, geolocation, audio recording, sound, vibration, storage. Note: not all these features are supported on all mobile phone platforms
    • PhoneGap prerequisites: Need to be a html/javascript expert. Also, it doesn’t help you with UI, you need to be able to develop that
    • So with PhoneGap app development, you’ll probably be doing UIs by using JQueryUI or something like that.
    • Note: PhoneGap ultimately creates a native app that users install. Not just a website that they visit in the browser.
  • At this point, Rohit, showed actual PhoneGap code for a mobile app – to write an app that shows a google map of my current location.
  • Big challenge of PhoneGap is that you need to bring your own UI development framework. This is an advantage also! – PhoneGap allows you to have same UI framework for website as well as your mobile app.
  • Rohit’s suggestions for UI framework – 1. GWT 2. jQueryMobile
  • With Titanium, you write apps in Javascript. This is interpreted by MozillaRhino on Android, and by Webkit JavascriptCore on iOS
    • You have two different directories for images – one for Android, & one for iPhone, because they handle images differently.
    • iPhone requires just one size of images. Android allows different images for different screen sizes/resolutions/orientations.
    • Titanium problem – layout is absolute. For people used to the great layout capabilities of Android, this is a big step down
    • Titanium uses native UI (iPhone and Android), where are PhoneGap uses non-native (html/css) UI. Former gives better experience…
  • PhoneGap/Titanium both use Javascript Interpretation, so both can’t do multi-threaded apps
  • Building your own webkit based cross-platform framework makes sense if you want to overcome limitations of phonegap/titanium.
  • This won’t be as clean as phonegap/titanium, but might be good for your specific case. Steal phonegap/titanium code if required!
  • Comparison of PhoneGap vs Titanium. Titanium more proprietary, limited UI, …
    html5/css3/javascript is the future; but not there yet. Until then, write to webkit specs…

Android Performance Tuning by Anand Hariharan

Next speaker was Anand Hariharan talking about Android Performance tuning.

  • For app performance: first focus on what the user wants, don’t just improve performance for the sake of improving performance. Optimize only after measuring performance, and having specific performance goals. A lot of performance tuning, is really about managing user perception. When doing something that will take time, keep user engaged.
  • Don’t optimize everything for performance – you don’t have the time. Focus on the most important user visible features and fix those. In mobile world – reduce features and use the time saved on fixing performance.
  • Manage user perception better: e.g. Apple’s use of loading a bitmap image of app at beginning to give impression that app has loaded. At app startup time, load a bitmap that looks like your app without the latest data. Gives impression that app load is fast.
  • Performance tips: All platforms have a “recommended best practices” doc. Read that – many developers dont 🙂 e.g. Android best practice: for tasks that take time, use a background service (not an activity).
  • Anand talking about how to avoid an “Application Not Responding” (ANR) dialog for your app
    • An android app is single-threaded. So don’t do io (network or disk) synchronously. Use an async mechanism.
  • Keep activities small. Don’t overload activities. Use different activities to do different things.
  • Use the minimum number of views. Do not use a deeply nested view hierarchy. Your view hierarchy shouldn’t be more than 3 levels deep. If you’re views are getting complicated, consider writing custom views.
  • Track memory allocations. Garbage collection happening during user activity causes slowdowns.
  • Close your cursors. Otherwise garbage collector cannot reclaim memory. Then you get GC cycles, and slowdowns.
  • use onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() to retain large amounts of data between device orientation changes (landscape to portrait)
  • Use SoftReferences to cache data so that the garbage collector can reclaim the memory when required.
  • Avoid database writes as far as possible. Writes take 5ms to 200ms. And full SD card has slower writes.
  • Avoid using data from mutiple tables in a single list (AdapterView). First copy data from multiple tables to a single table and show that. e.g. in Email app, subject and body came from different tables. This really slowed down the inbox view (which shows first line of body).
  • Tools to help with android app optimization: Fix your views using: hierarchyviewer, layoutopt. Check flow & times using: traceview. Use zipalign to optimize your apk (improves app load time).
  • Above all, you must understand what you’re optimizing and why. Measure, measure, measure.

Pune Design Festival – 6 days of design events in Pune 10-15 Feb

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From 10th to 15th Feb, Pune will play host to a host of design events across the city, organized as a part of the Pune Design Festival. To quote the website:

Design has become the epicentre of many business success stories in India. The value of design stretches across all industries and sectors – from manufacturing to services. Recognizing this integral role of Design for the competitiveness of your businesses and betterment of our society we organize such events annually. This year’s edition brings you rich and diversified events to help us learn from each other and contribute to the betterment of the Industry.

We are pleased to bring to you the 5th Pune Design Festival from 10-15th February 2011 at various locations across the city, being organised along with MCCIA.

There are a large number of events being held – see the website for the full list. Some of them are free events, some have nominal charges and some have substantial fees. Note: a number of these festivals are geared towards automobile design and industrial design, so don’t go there expecting software/graphic design…

The free and nominal fee events have been listed in the PuneTech Calendar. For the others you’ll need to check the details on the Pune Design Festival website

What to expect at GNUnify – Pune’s biggest open source conference – 11/12 Feb

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GNUnify is possibly India’s biggest open source conference and it is happening in Pune on 11th and 12th February. The schedule (day 1, and day 2) is up and there’s a lot of interesting stuff.

There are workshops, talks, labs, and a wikipedia track. Here are what we believe are the highlights:

  • Workshops: There’s one workshop on efficient numerical computing with Scilab, and another on data visualization with R. Data visualization, data analysis and in general number crunching will be one of the most important activities of all software development in the next 5 years, so this is something that people should take an interest in. For beginners, there’s a two-day workshop on building websites quickly with drupal. And the ‘Beginning with Python’ workshop is another one you should take an interest in because python is a great language to learn and use. (There are also workshops on firewalls, GCC, C+Linux, and LaTeX that you can check out.)

  • Talks: there’s a bunch of talks on security, so anybody interested in this area has a good choice. Understanding Firewalls. Linux Hardening. Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing. For the systems hackers there’s embedded systems design and development, there’s virtual networks various linux utilities, and linux kernel debugging. There’s lots to choose from for people in the application layer too: harnessing the poewr of sms for your web portal, Android native development, data visualization. There are a bunch of talks on mediawiki (the software that runs wikipedia) and Mozilla. And a talk on Haskell – one of the most interesting programming languages that you could learn today.

And remember, many of these talks are not by local Pune people; a lot of the speakers are travelling from outside Pune, and in fact, from outside India for these talks. So, if you miss these talks, you will not get a chance to hear them again for a long time.

And even after that long laundry list of talks that I’ve mentioned, there are a whole lot of other talks, labs, and workshops that I’ve missed out. So take a look at the GNUnify website and register to attend.

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

PHPCamp is back – Register to be a Speaker

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India’s largest unconference, PHPCamp is back. PHPCamp 2011 will be on Saturday, 5th March, 2011. The venue is not yet decided but the call for speakers is out.

If you’ve done any interesting work in PHP, this is your chance to show it off to 100s of PHP developers and students (actually the number has been known to even go up to 1000). If your company is doing cool PHP work, then the easiest way to attract star PHP developers is to give a talk at PHPCamp.

PHPCamp is a “barcamp” for PHP developers and enthusiasts. It is basically an unorganized conference where anybody can attend, it is free and open to all, and anybody can register to be a speaker.

For more information check out the PHPCamp FAQ