Demo Camp and All night moviethon !

 

India’s First Webcamp another joint initiative with The Knowledge Foundation was held last saturday at the Rails Factory office.  The first session was on Openstreet maps by GK from Anna University. Mapping and Location based services is one of my most favorable topics since we have been involved in developing applications on that domain for quite sometime back. The greatest misgiving for developers in this domain is that none of the maps of India in this domain are update or accurate in terms of availability for public use. There is a similar initiative going on currently called the Free mapWorkshop conducted in parallel at leading metros in India with the GPS units used by the team are given away at very subsidized cost. For more details on this project pls check out this site http://wiki.freemap.in/moin.cgi/FreeMapIndia2008 . TKF was liasing with Jace ( KiranJonnalagadda (jace AT pobox DOT com)) of Barcamp Bangalore to get the team to visit chennai as well. But then we had asked them too late to include in the schedule so we couldnt make it . But as GK said "  you dont need a couple of white hats to tell you what is needed ! Go ahead and organise a workshop we are ready to help you "

Groovy and GRAILS was presented by Prabhu. More on the topic is available on the slides

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Next there was a presentation on the topic Flex ing your web applications by vaidhy. It was a very interesting session on the capabilities of Flex for the web environment follwed by Feed back session from the event attendees to understand what the audience is looking for in future sessions of Webcamp also gave us good idea on the directions that we need to pursue to ensure that content will be a great value differentiator on further editions. Most of the audience was expecting demos and not just presentations. Webcamp should also provide a balaced mix of the business environment available 

Tim talked on Jasperforge a opensource BI tool with api’s for third party development ending the final presentation by gk again on Django and its widespread use in opensource environment. The event came to an end by 7:30 pm leaving us with little time to catch up some dinner and move to our next item in the agenda an All night Moviethon. We had actually planned a RTFF but owing to venue constraints we couldnt hold the same so the idea got reduced to an indoor event that will be a moviethon. Saturday night a couple of us got together for a all night Moviethon at one of our friends place. More about the exploits will be found at gapp, nandhu , mahen and TUD’s blogs. Movies screened were Natural Born Killers – Oliver stone & Tarantino, Superbad and 3:10 to yuma *ring Russel Crowe. After the all nighter i returned back home by 7 in the morning exhausted to rest through the entire sunday morning before settliing down to watch Reliance power announce 3:5 bonus shares to its shareholders and then  India lose an excellent match to Australia.

tags: serendio, jaspersoft, openstreetmap, webcamp, moviethon, nandhu, dinesh, tud, gaap, sagaro, location, based, services, gps, gis, mapping, grails, django, flex, vaidhy, BI, syed, nazir, razik, the, knowledge, foudation, tkf Tags: reliance, power, shares, bonus, ipo Powered by Qumana

Agile Scrum meet with Sanjeev Augustine !

Last weekend was a very engaging schedule starting from Friday evening when we had a very engaging discussion with Sanjiv Augustine on Agile programming and SCRUM practice prevalent in the market. Participants in the discussion were practitioners from Wipro, Thoughtworks, EDS, Cap Gemini, Cognizant and our core team of Sid, Narain, me and Yessel. The discussion happened in our recent venue (Gandhinagar Club) which is proving to be convenient both in terms of organising and economy of scale.

"Doing the same things everyday will not deliver new results. To change the results you ar egetting , you must change the things you are doing " – Robin Sharma

The entire discussion was towards quelling fears and doubts of Project managers of traditional waterfall model towards Agile practice and SCRUM. Discussions of this kind tend to throw light on the project management practices followed in different companies here. Interesting enough to hear that lot of IT companies are adopting towards Agile practices enterprise wide with an objective to drive quality to meet global standards.

It translates into a unwritten message that all these MNC’s readiness to adaptability and change management .Change is the most dominant force in the business climate today. Technology is changing , markets are changing and even our products are becoming obsolete by the time they hit our markets because the competition is always testing something more advanced. To meet such competion our service providers need to be resilent to meet such evolving changes with great agility and speed. Related to IT projects it visibly shows the readiness of our service providers to accept client changes at any point in the project and always work towards earned value metrics.

Earned Value management is a great advantage in Agile practice because the preparation of priority list by itself is done based on the features that delived value to the product owner /customer is placed under the same order such that the features that hold higher value are placed on top of the priority list thus as each sprint progresses greated value is delived to the customer thus making earned value management a great advantage on agile processes.

The evening was made very interactive by games based on the agile process that saw some active participation from the audience.We might see more of such programs in the months to come .

Tags: wipro, gemini, cap, eds, cognizant, fuente, scrum, agile, project, management, waterfall, model, sid, yessel, narain, thoughtworks, chennai, Tags: robin, sharma Powered by Qumana