Tag Archives: unconferences

Call for Proposals: Pune Scala Symposium 12 April

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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.

Event Report: IndicThreads Java Conference 2011

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(This article about the IndicThreads Java Conference 2011 was written by Abhay Bakshi for DZone. It has been re-published here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

Attending a conference (probably as renowned and as recognized as the Java conference by IndicThreads) adds to your muscle – Period. By the way, I have picked up from the same thread — same tone and similar spirit — from March 2011. IndicThreads held the Q11 conference then, which I had a chance to attend and then write a short report on for DZone. If you attended IndicThreads conferences before, your feedback is also welcome — through your blogs or through places like this report hosting page.

Now, you may ask – How Was the Environment This Time?

First and foremost, I would like to say this — you could feel the thought process from Harshad Oak (Owner – IndicThreads – Conference Organizer) all throughout the conference. When I attended the conference sessions, I could see that one presentation simply led to another one. And somehow I could also relate this fact to the earlier Q11 conference; and could see the passion that Harshad has when he arranges these events.

Just as a side note – Harshad is the first Java champion in India and he continues to serve the IT community. He is ably supported by his wife Sangeeta Oak in these endeavors. This young couple gives a lot of attention to detail for the events!

The Conference Agenda in short

The conference agenda included the following topics (Friday/Saturday — Dec 02/03):

  • The Java Report (Harshad Oak)
  • Scalability Considerations (Yogesh Deshpande)
  • PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application (Kshitiz Saxena)
  • Solr as your Search and Suggest Engine (Karan Nangru)
  • Testing Concurrent Java Programs (Sameer Arora)
  • Scala Collections: Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java (Dhananjay Nene)
  • REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers (Prasad Nirantar)
  • Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud (Kshitiz Saxena – yes again! He has awesome topic coverage.)
  • Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka (Vikas Hazrati)
  • Simplifying builds with Gradle (Saager Mhatre)
  • Using Scala for Building DSLs (Abhijit Sharma)

The presentation slides are hosted at http://j11.indicthreads.com/slides

My Thoughts on the Agenda

On the first day of the conference, I noticed that there are 7 sessions to attend on Friday and 4 more sessions on Saturday. Frankly, I thought there was some kind of mismatch in arranging these sessions. But my opinion changed as the conference went on from Friday into Saturday. The next day was intentionally kept lighter. As an attendee, I now think that your mind probably absorbs and retains more information during the initial parts of a conference. I believe that IndicThreads is getting better overall conference after conference.

What I Wanted to Get from Each Session

I planned on getting 3 things from the sessions (that was my ROI!) — first, how the knowledge earned will apply towards the business domain at my work place; second, my personal interactions with the speaker(s) from networking perspectives; and third, how I can help Harshad and his team and provide helpful feedback. Even with events like NFJS, TSSS in USA, I always received and offered my best to organizers Jay Zimmerman, Floyd Marinescu et al.

I should also mention, I still remember Rick Ross’ keynote speech at TSSS and how it was inspirational to many of us there. Point is that industry leaders like Harshad, Rick, Floyd (and of course some more) are doing everything to lead developers all across the world to be better IT professionals. Sometimes they pay from their own pockets to see results.

The Actual Sessions

I am not going to cover all the details from all the talks, well, it’s not possible. The slides are available for entire content.

The Java Report

In the keynote speech, Harshad mentioned that things moved very rapidly after Sun was purchased by Oracle. He later encouraged participants to have a look at topics such as Java EE 6 Web Profile, Java FX 2.0 (all Java), Java EE 7 and a few more. Harshad raised a point – do you as a Java expert look the same “sexy” today as you did when Java started? The answer is “less sexy”. He also said that Java ME was not offering many new things for quite a while now.

Scalability Considerations

Yogesh covered Vertical Scaling and Horizontal Scaling, and principles behind both techniques. He backed up his presentation with a helpful case study.

PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application

Kshitiz works at Sun/Oracle for last 10 years. He explained PaaS in simpler terms. It was very important to keep things simple. The speech was well accepted by the audience. Just as I was putting this article together, I saw that Javalobby had published a fresh article on PaaS 2.0 — it looks quite relevant to our discussion.

Solr as Your Search and Suggest Engine

It was very good to learn from Karan about Embedded Solr Server versus Commons Http Solr Server, and the various “search” and “suggestion” cases. Karan is quite passionate about Solr.

Testing Concurrent Java Programs

I don’t develop as much concurrent Java code at work as I do some other pieces; but learning from Sameer clicked a few ideas in my mind for a business case that we have at work. We (AEGIS) do some case executions in our workflow, and ideas from concurrency can be applied to what we do. By the way, for the intense session that we had with Sameer, fortunately, there was a coffee break after the session. Hats off to Sameer for how much he knows about this topic.

Scala Collections – Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java

Although Dhananjay knew a lot, he was addressing a very specific topic “Collections”. To me, the topic could have been broader (or be split in two sessions). Scala is a powerful language and initial learning curve looks longer for a beginner. I should mention that Dhananjay preferred IntelliJ for Scala-based development — rightfully so.

REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers

Prasad (speaker) has a background from Akron, Ohio (M.S.). He compared content negotiation techniques (JSON, XML, and Portable Binary Content) with focus on Google Protocol Buffers. His comparison of Google Protocol Buffers with Apache Avro was very apt.

Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud

Kshitiz explained the terms IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. There are vendors other than Sun that offer PaaS support — but standards are lacking. He explained Java EE 7 focus on PaaS – Elasticity which has progressed from single node implementation to multi-node multi-instance clustering to SLA driven Elasticity. Refer the slides for more details.

Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka

Vikas writes for InfoQ. He said that if you wanted to learn Akka, then you needed to keep in mind that Akka was designed to make developer’s life easier by addressing concurrency, scalability and fault-tolerance in applications. The founder of Akka is Jonas Boner, and I find Jonas’ article on Akka hosted by Javalobby at this page. As per Vikas, Akka is good for event-based systems, whereas Hadoop for batch-based systems.

Simplifying Builds (Build Scripts) with Gradle

An excellent slide presentation and visual illustrations by Saager. He corrected the name of the topic to “Simplifying build scripts..”. He compared Gradle with Ant and Maven, and mentioned that Gradle describes builds with only as much text as is absolutely necessary.

Using Scala for Building DSLs

This was the only session where there were no questions from the audience! From Abhijit’s (speaker) angle, it was a bit uncomfortable feeling; but I later mentioned to him that the presentation was so straight-forward (note – not an easy compilation) and neatly arranged, the questions were answered even before they were asked. I recommend – just download the presentation, and you will get to see what I mean. Good to learn about Scala in this domain.

Every session was little over an hour. And all speakers covered their sessions very well.

Past Reviews of IndicThreads Conference on Java

Some of the celebrity authors and speakers like Arun Gupta and Vikas Hazrati have reviewed their prior Java IndicThreads conference experiences by writing articles on their respective blogs (you may access the reviews: Arun, Vikas). It is rewarding to learn from such experts in the field.

Lastly, about the Food and Quizzes and Prizes!

I believe, Sangeeta made awesome choices for food at lunch and the breaks! As well as, she put up short quizzes and announced prizes in different categories. IndicThreads have maintained the “Green” theme and I won a prize in that category.

My Top Three Take-away Points

My top three take away points from J11 are – rejuvenating yourself by looking at technical topics from speakers’/attendees’ eyes and adding to your knowledge, networking with experts so that you can offer your best and receive the best from them, and just knowing where the Java industry stands today.

Conclusion

There was an “Unconference” session, where everybody who participated voiced a need for the Java groups in the city to come together. I get a feel that awareness in the industry about such conferences is increasing, and demand for such speakers and quality offered by these conferences is going to increase in few more short years.

Harshad encourages local speakers to come out and respond to the RFPs (and participate). For those who only want to attend can also win a FREE pass to the conference! All in all, it was worth attending the Java conference by IndicThreads.

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

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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

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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

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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: 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.

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

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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

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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

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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

Product Camp Pune: A free (un-)conference for Product Management & Marketing – 1 Aug

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What: Product Camp Pune – A Collaborative, User-Organized, Conference (i.e. a barcamp) on Product Management and Marketing
When: Sunday, August 1st, 10am-4pm
Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. Register here

Product Camp Pune Logo
ProductCamp Pune is a free event that will give you an opportunity to meet people involved in product management and marketing. Click on the logo to be taken to the registration page.

The Importance of Product Management and Marketing

Have you ever wondered why some really cool products fail in the market, and some products that seem really stupid succeed? Have you ever noticed that some of the best features of the products you’re working on are hardly used by anybody? Have you ever completely failed to understand the roadmap of your product?

If you have experienced any of the above, you’re not alone. Most people, especially techies, and especially Indian techies, have a very poor understanding of what customers really want, what they need, and what they would be willing to pay for. This is the job of Product Management and Marketing. Most people’s career would improve significantly if they spent some time acquiring this skill, or at least understanding the basics.

Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of the incredibly successful Zynga Games (the creators of FarmVille), has this to say about what skills you should focus on acquiring for career advancement:

If you can be a product manager, you can acquire the experience of acting as a CEO. The skills gained in product roadmapping, prioritizing tasks, interoffice communications, customer understanding, and product marketing are absolute necessities for being an effective enterprise lead.

Similarly, Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape, successful serial entrepreneur, and investor points out that “the only thing that matters” for success of a startup is product/market fit. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. If you don’t have product/market fit, then you’re bound to fail, no matter how great your product is, and no matter how great your team is. With a bad product/market fit, you’ll struggle for years trying to find customers who don’t exist for your marvelous product, and your wonderful team will eventually get demoralized and quit, and your startup will die.

This is a new area for techies in India

For obvious reasons. Most of the work in the software technology sector in India has either been software services for companies abroad (in which case your company has no control over the product roadmap), or product development for companies whose main markets are in the US/Europe (in which case, the people doing product management/marketing are in US/Europe).

However, as the tech industry in India slowly matures, more and more product management and marketing roles are becoming available.

Here’s your opportunity to get started along this path

ProductCamp Pune is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Management and Marketing topics. ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn from, teach to, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development process.

And it’s free.

Just register here and show up.