So DevCamp is tomorrow; I haven't got my talk(s?) anywhere close to ready, so today is going to be a hard grind. Perhaps, I'll just do the Ruby talk and skip the js one?
Anyways, if you live in Bangalore or happen be in town on Saturday, 11th April, do consider dropping in (directions to ThoughtWorks office can be found on the wiki, map and all); there are 18 sessions up on the wiki and a bunch of interesting people participating, so it should be an entertaining gig.
Oh, and do remember to tell any of your friends who might be interested.
Showing posts with label event. Show all posts
Showing posts with label event. Show all posts
Announcing DevCamp Bangalore 2
We're happy to announce the second edition of DevCamp Bangalore, DevCamp Bangalore 2; it's happening on Saturday, 11th April 2009.
DevCamp is an un-conference by the hackers, for the hackers and of the hackers.
It's a species of BarCamp where anything a lover of computers and technology would consider important or entertaining goes.
The first DevCamp happened a little over a year ago and was a lot of fun; we're hoping hoping to keep that trend going with DCB2.
If you're planning to do a session at DCB2, do keep in mind the fact that everyone at DevCamp is a hacker, a pro. Please assume a high level of exposure and knowledge on the part of your audience and tailor your sessions to suit. Avoid 'Hello World' and how-to sessions which can be trivially found on the net. First hand war stories, in-depth analyses of topics and live demos are best.
Bangalore Functional Programming Group is meeting on Saturday, 14th March
The next bangalore-fp meetup is scheduled to take place on the 14'th of March at ThoughtWorks.
Presentations:.
1. Functional Programming 101 by Varoun
2. Dojo Zen aka Web 3D by Tom Elam
Date/Time: 14-Mar-2009, 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Location: ThoughtWorks Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd.
2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block, Diamond District
Airport Road, Bangalore - 560 008, India.
Directions + map here.
Presentations:.
1. Functional Programming 101 by Varoun
2. Dojo Zen aka Web 3D by Tom Elam
Date/Time: 14-Mar-2009, 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Location: ThoughtWorks Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd.
2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block, Diamond District
Airport Road, Bangalore - 560 008, India.
Directions + map here.
Bangalore functional programming group is meeting on the 31st
This months meet is on the 31st of January at 3:00 PM.
Details:
Speaker: Thomas Andrew Elam:
Subject: 'A Scheme interpreter inside every modern web browser; and applications for it' (This will be the first of his two episode 'blockbuster' presentation!)
Date/Time: 31-Jan-2009, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: ThoughtWorks Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd.
2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block, Diamond District view map
Airport Road, Bangalore - 560 008, India.
Please confirm your attendance by mail on the Bangalore FP list so that we have a rough estimate of the attendance. This will help us to arrange seating, refreshments etc.
Details:
Speaker: Thomas Andrew Elam:
Subject: 'A Scheme interpreter inside every modern web browser; and applications for it' (This will be the first of his two episode 'blockbuster' presentation!)
Date/Time: 31-Jan-2009, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: ThoughtWorks Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd.
2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block, Diamond District view map
Airport Road, Bangalore - 560 008, India.
Please confirm your attendance by mail on the Bangalore FP list so that we have a rough estimate of the attendance. This will help us to arrange seating, refreshments etc.
BRUG meeting on Saturday, 20th December
The Bangalore Ruby User Group will be meeting up this Saturday at 4pm. There is no set agenda; the meeting is divided into two halves, with members talking about something they've worked on recently in the first half and an open Q & A session in the second where folks can pick each others brains about all things Ruby.
The first half will be quick, ten minute sessions. If you're planning to participate, please remember that a full-fledged presentation with slides is nice, but not necessary.
I'm planning to talk about some of the smells and pitfalls someone new to Ruby should watch out for when contributing to a codebase.
If you're interested in attending, please let us know by sending a mail to the list so that we have a rough idea of how many folks will be participating.
Details
Date: Saturday, 20th December
Time: 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Venue:
ThoughtWorks,
2nd Floor, Tower C,
Corporate Block, Diamond District,
Airport Road, Bangalore.
Directions, Map and Parking.
The first half will be quick, ten minute sessions. If you're planning to participate, please remember that a full-fledged presentation with slides is nice, but not necessary.
I'm planning to talk about some of the smells and pitfalls someone new to Ruby should watch out for when contributing to a codebase.
If you're interested in attending, please let us know by sending a mail to the list so that we have a rough idea of how many folks will be participating.
Details
Date: Saturday, 20th December
Time: 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Venue:
ThoughtWorks,
2nd Floor, Tower C,
Corporate Block, Diamond District,
Airport Road, Bangalore.
Directions, Map and Parking.
DevCamp picks up steam
So it's official - Martin Fowler has confirmed that he'll be participating in DevCamp Bangalore. DevCamp seems to be picking up steam with over twenty sessions proposed so far and a week and half to go (oh, in case you're wondering, DevCamp is a one day un-conference focussed on the art of software development).
There are a whole bunch of interesting people showing up - I've already mentioned that Martin will be there, but so will Ravi Mohan, who writes 'One Man hacking', Pradeep BV, co-founder of Mapunity, Rajiv Poddar, founder, CEO and developer at Sedna Wireless, Siddharta Govindaraj, founder and developer at SilverStripe Software, Elizabeth Keogh, core comitter on the JBehave project... and that's just about half of the people whom I know - there are a couple of dozen other hackers whom I don't and I'm pretty sure they'd be just as interesting to meet and hang out with.
The topics proposed are just as interesting - here's a quick snapshot:
Biju Chacko has proposed and will be moderating a bunch of lightning talks. That's going be happening sometime during the gig; we'll figure out timings and stuff on the fly.
If you're in Bangalore, or will be on the 9th (it's a Saturday) please don't hesitate to sign-up and propose a session (it's a community gig and is completely free). I'll quote the rule-of-thumb for DevCamp sessions here:
There are a whole bunch of interesting people showing up - I've already mentioned that Martin will be there, but so will Ravi Mohan, who writes 'One Man hacking', Pradeep BV, co-founder of Mapunity, Rajiv Poddar, founder, CEO and developer at Sedna Wireless, Siddharta Govindaraj, founder and developer at SilverStripe Software, Elizabeth Keogh, core comitter on the JBehave project... and that's just about half of the people whom I know - there are a couple of dozen other hackers whom I don't and I'm pretty sure they'd be just as interesting to meet and hang out with.
The topics proposed are just as interesting - here's a quick snapshot:
- "Monads in Depth - what they are, what they are good for and how to use them in your favorite language" exclusive OR "Reinforcement Learning - Algorithms and Applications in Robotics" exclusive OR "Vajra - a high performance scheme implementation for Robotics Programming" Ravi Mohan
- Writing a Java Script Editor From Scratch In Eclipse Jude
- Writing a reddit clone as an orkut application Jude
- Programming with Android - Selvan
- Touchscreen, SMS handling, Handling web-pages
- Phone state handling
- Programmatically accessing mobile hardware (Vibarator et al)
- FixedPoint Math, 2D Graphics, 3D Graphics with OpenGL-ES
- "Let's Develop an Open J2ME Mobile Game" - Zarina
- An introduction to Ruby On Rails, Some good plugins for Rails, server configuration for rails application, Bhushan Ahire
- Getting Started with Mercurial - Biju Chacko
- Open ended discussion on 'What really is an enterprise level app?' - moderated by Pradeep B V
- Call Graph - A free call recording and indexing application for Skype - Rajiv Poddar
- Deploying python web apps on the desktop - Siddhi
- Intruder Alert - Snort signature Development - PoC to Signature - Akash Mahajan
- Microformats and Semantic Web - Jeswin P
- MOOSE - Multi-scale Object Oriented Simulation Engine for Systems Biology and Neuroscience - Raamesh Deshpande and Subhasis Ray
- Search Mashups - Some ideas for making search more customizable - Dorai Thodla
- Semantic Web Indexing - Kallol Borah
- Poshzones - a bazaar approach to the Semantic web - Sriram Narayan
- Start developing with GWT - Thejesh GN
- Writing wargaming aids using Django - Manoj Govindan
- Aakraman - A game where your Ruby code competes with that of others - Chirag/Akshay
- Mobitop - Writing cool mobile web applications over Mobisy's Mobile Web Platform 'Mobitop'
- Behaviour Driven Development - learn from JBehave but do it in JUnit - Elizabeth Keogh
- Bringing web applications to the desktop using Mozilla Prism - Ram/Suresh
Biju Chacko has proposed and will be moderating a bunch of lightning talks. That's going be happening sometime during the gig; we'll figure out timings and stuff on the fly.
If you're in Bangalore, or will be on the 9th (it's a Saturday) please don't hesitate to sign-up and propose a session (it's a community gig and is completely free). I'll quote the rule-of-thumb for DevCamp sessions here:
Please assume a high level of exposure and knowledge on the part of your audience and tailor your sessions to suit. Avoid 'Hello World' and how-to sessions which can be trivially found on the net. First hand war stories, in-depth analysis of topics and hands on demos are best.
BangPyper and BdotNet meetings at ThoughtWorks Bangalore on 26th January
The BangPypers (Bangalore Python User Group) will be meeting at 4:00pm on Saturday, 26th January to discuss the Django web framework.
The BdotNet (Bangalore .Net User Group) are also meeting at 4:00pm on Saturday, 26th January for a session on "Sorting It All Out - Even More Words on Collation" by Michael Kaplan. The original announcement can be found here.
Both are open, free events and anyone can attend.
The address of ThoughtWorks Bangalore is:
ThoughtWorks India Pvt. Ltd.,
Diamond District Corporate Block,
Tower C, 2nd floor,
Airport Road, Bangalore.
You can get directions and a map from an older post of mine.
The BdotNet (Bangalore .Net User Group) are also meeting at 4:00pm on Saturday, 26th January for a session on "Sorting It All Out - Even More Words on Collation" by Michael Kaplan. The original announcement can be found here.
Both are open, free events and anyone can attend.
The address of ThoughtWorks Bangalore is:
ThoughtWorks India Pvt. Ltd.,
Diamond District Corporate Block,
Tower C, 2nd floor,
Airport Road, Bangalore.
You can get directions and a map from an older post of mine.
DevCamp Bangalore is happening in February
It's official now - DevCamp Bangalore is happening on February 9th 2008. The wiki is now up and registrations are open.
DevCamp is an un-conference whose format is very similar to that of BarCamp. The only difference is that DevCamp caters specifically to the software development community, whereas BarCamp address a much broader area of interests.
Please do start blogging about it and remember to tag all your posts with DCB1. There is much that remains to be finalised, so stay tuned for updates because we're trying to ensure that this DevCamp will be worth remembering. Watch this space.
DevCamp is an un-conference whose format is very similar to that of BarCamp. The only difference is that DevCamp caters specifically to the software development community, whereas BarCamp address a much broader area of interests.
Please do start blogging about it and remember to tag all your posts with DCB1. There is much that remains to be finalised, so stay tuned for updates because we're trying to ensure that this DevCamp will be worth remembering. Watch this space.
BOJUG and BdotNET meetings at ThoughtWorks Bangalore over the weekend
The Bangalore .Net user group is meeting on Saturday, 22nd December at 4:00pm. There will be two sessions covering Spring.Net and NHibernate. More details here.
The Bangalore Open Java user group is meeting on Sunday, 23rd December at 10:30 am. Sessions include a design patterns session (covering strategy and chain of responsibility) and a Ruby/JRuby primer covering 'Why is Ruby different?' and 'What's the big deal with this metaprogramming thing anyway?'. More details here.
These events are open to everyone. You can find directions to ThoughtWorks Bangalore in an older post of mine here.
The Bangalore Open Java user group is meeting on Sunday, 23rd December at 10:30 am. Sessions include a design patterns session (covering strategy and chain of responsibility) and a Ruby/JRuby primer covering 'Why is Ruby different?' and 'What's the big deal with this metaprogramming thing anyway?'. More details here.
These events are open to everyone. You can find directions to ThoughtWorks Bangalore in an older post of mine here.
The Demos in MoDeMo
Here's an outline of the demos/presenters scheduled for MoDeMo at ThoughtWorks on Sunday, 16th December.
- SMS Social Networking in Babalife , Sean Blagsvedt, Babalife
- Mobile commerece, mobile banking, Ritesh Mittal, NGPay
- Mango Application Framework,Sunil Maheswari, Mango Technologies
- Mysore Dassara - Flash Based Application,Vivek,TheDesignTree
- Mobile Photo Blogging,Varun, Fonearena & MoMo Chennai
- Online Video on Nokia Phones, Rajeswari, Nokia
- Mobitop - a Mobile Application Platform, Lalit, Mobisy
- Game Developemnt Demo, Zarina
- Mobi-Winsk20,Nalin
- Opera Mini Browser, Navjot & Sagar
- Mobile Map Application that does not require GPRS, Vishnu
- iPhone and 3rd Party application, Siddharth
- Mobile Video Streaming, Kunal, Novix
- Google my Location on Mobile, Ajay
- SMS Gupshup - Mobile Social Messaging Platform, Tathagata, Webaroo
- Zook.in - Mobile Social Search, Sameer Shishodia, Ziva Software
- Foodie Hotline - Ubona Voice Search Engine, Vishal Lal,
- Mobile Adult Literacy, Aditya Mishra, TCS
- OpenGL based games, Selvan
- Mobile Visa Money Transfer, Naveen Thangiah, mChek
- Mobile Photo Application, Manish
- Entreprise Tracking with Mobile LBS, Anand, Mobiance
- Mobile Mandi Bhav , Parul Awasthy, TCS
- Mobile Cruiser - Symbian Call Handling Application
- MyDuniya - Integrating the Mobile and the Web World, Keshav
ThoughtWorks is hosting MoDeMo on December 16th
The guys behind MOMO Bangalore are organising MoDeMo at ThoughtWorks Bangalore on Sunday, 16th December.
MoDeMo is badged as 'the mobilists show and tell'. To quote the website
You can register over at the MoDeMo website. Priority is given to those with demos and the total attendance is capped at 150. There is no registration fee.
If you don't have a demo but wish to attend, please register yourself as an alpha user by filling in the 'Demo' field with 'Alpha User'. Entry at the venue will be on a first come first serve basis, so please be early.
Tentative Schedule
The reason the schedule is tentative is because minor alterations will be made to the duration of the lunch break and the start time may be moved up based on the number of demos happening.
There are 15 demos currently registered and at least one VC (LightSpeed Ventures) has also shown interest.
You are also free to bring cameras, laptops and cell phones (duh!) to the event, so please feel free to moblog to your heart's content.
MoDeMo is badged as 'the mobilists show and tell'. To quote the website
MoDeMo is a one day event aimed at being a place to showcase, share and discuss the most interesting things in the wireless and mobile space in India. It hopes to gather early adopters, trend-setters, experts, developers and entrepreneurs among others to summarize the happenings of 2007 and collectively provide a glimpse into trends in 2008 in the burgeoning mobility space.
At MoDeMo you can show a new/interesting mobile service that you use or have used, a hobby project that you may have hacked together or mobile frameworks, services and businesses that you are building.
You can register over at the MoDeMo website. Priority is given to those with demos and the total attendance is capped at 150. There is no registration fee.
If you don't have a demo but wish to attend, please register yourself as an alpha user by filling in the 'Demo' field with 'Alpha User'. Entry at the venue will be on a first come first serve basis, so please be early.
Tentative Schedule
| Venue opens | 8.00 AM |
| Intro | 9.30 AM - 10.00 AM |
| Demos | 10.00 AM - 1.00 PM |
| Lunch | 1.00 PM - 2.30 PM |
| Demos | 2.30 PM - 6.00 PM |
There are 15 demos currently registered and at least one VC (LightSpeed Ventures) has also shown interest.
You are also free to bring cameras, laptops and cell phones (duh!) to the event, so please feel free to moblog to your heart's content.
Barcamp Bangalore 5
I'm planning to attend the next Barcamp happening at IIMB on the 17th and 18th of November, 2007. I suspect most of my time is going to be spent at the hacker, ruby and extreme programming collectives with a bit on the side for any startup related collectives.
The Ruby collective has some interesting people showing up, but no clear agenda or talks (which is fine - this is a Barcamp, eh?). Ditto for the Hacker collective. The Extreme Programming collective is being facilitated by Naresh Jain of ASCI - he has several hands-on sessions in the pipeline which promise to be interesting. By hands on, he means you need to get your laptop with a JDK, Eclipse and a few other things so that you can participate and get your hands dirty. Less talking, more hacking. Topics to be covered include Test Driven Development, refactoring, and other XP related stuff.
If you're interested in these or any other collectives, please remember to register here.
The Ruby collective has some interesting people showing up, but no clear agenda or talks (which is fine - this is a Barcamp, eh?). Ditto for the Hacker collective. The Extreme Programming collective is being facilitated by Naresh Jain of ASCI - he has several hands-on sessions in the pipeline which promise to be interesting. By hands on, he means you need to get your laptop with a JDK, Eclipse and a few other things so that you can participate and get your hands dirty. Less talking, more hacking. Topics to be covered include Test Driven Development, refactoring, and other XP related stuff.
If you're interested in these or any other collectives, please remember to register here.
Open Coffee Club Bangalore meeting at ThoughtWorks
The next OCC Bangalore meeting is being held at ThoughtWorks Bangalore on 14th October between 11 am and 1 pm.
You can sign up at Upcoming so we have some idea about the numbers. Registration is not a pre-requisite, it just makes it easier for us to plan.
The OCC Bangalore mailing list is here.
What's the Open Coffee Club? Here's a quote from the website:
You can sign up at Upcoming so we have some idea about the numbers. Registration is not a pre-requisite, it just makes it easier for us to plan.
The OCC Bangalore mailing list is here.
What's the Open Coffee Club? Here's a quote from the website:
The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.
I'm at the Yahoo Hack Day
A few of my friends (and colleagues) and I are at the Hack Day at the Taj today. If you're there to, do say hi.
An interesting day at the NASSCOM Product Workshop
I've just spent the day at the NASSCOM Product Workshop and I found it remarkably useful and relevant. I won't repeat the list of speakers here since you can get the details from the programme.
I was uncertain whether it was worth my attending this event, since I wasn't sure what I could expect from it - and it involved giving up a precious Saturday. My doubts were reinforced when I showed up at the Leela this morning to find most of the people outside the Grand Ballroom (where the event was happening) dressed in suits and ties. On the upside, it did make me feel better about wearing a sensible formal shirt instead of my favourite (and now faded) L.L.Bean T.
Anyhoo, once the sessions and panel discussions started, I was reassured. The presenters knew what they were talking about and were totally the been-there-done-that kind of guys. Completely relevant gyan and very, very informative. Even more interestingly, once the crowd had settled down I realised that most of the audience were the usual suspects from Barcamp, MOMO and OCC. Except for one troll, but hey, at least one troll per seminar is standard, right? I'm not naming any names. You know who you are. Much of the blame for this (the overwhelmingly MOMO/BC/OCC crowd, not the troll, bless him) can be laid squarely at the feet of Kesava Reddy. Jokes aside, NASSCOM should thank him for sending out their mail about the event to all the lists. I'm quite certain that over 70% of the crowd there showed up because of his forward - I for one certainly would never have heard of it if not for him. Thanks, dude!
So, a couple of things that I observed:
That said, NASSCOM has done an excellent job and I'd sign up for the next such event without a second thought. I certainly had a good time and the food at the Leela was as good as I remember it to be from my TW bootcamp two years ago. I'd put on five kilos in the five weeks we spent in the Leela. But I digress...
In a nutshell, the fact that the right people were invited to speak at this gig made all the difference. I'm looking forward to the next one (we've been promised there will be more) and I hope the trend of bringing in experienced speakers continues.
PS: Some of the usual suspects at this event included my friends Akshat and Vidit, co-founders of Activ, Manish Agrawal, co-founder of picsquare.com, Venkat Ramana, CEO of OutSmart360 and Kesava Reddy of Digital Strait. And they're all under thirty. Go figure.
I was uncertain whether it was worth my attending this event, since I wasn't sure what I could expect from it - and it involved giving up a precious Saturday. My doubts were reinforced when I showed up at the Leela this morning to find most of the people outside the Grand Ballroom (where the event was happening) dressed in suits and ties. On the upside, it did make me feel better about wearing a sensible formal shirt instead of my favourite (and now faded) L.L.Bean T.
Anyhoo, once the sessions and panel discussions started, I was reassured. The presenters knew what they were talking about and were totally the been-there-done-that kind of guys. Completely relevant gyan and very, very informative. Even more interestingly, once the crowd had settled down I realised that most of the audience were the usual suspects from Barcamp, MOMO and OCC. Except for one troll, but hey, at least one troll per seminar is standard, right? I'm not naming any names. You know who you are. Much of the blame for this (the overwhelmingly MOMO/BC/OCC crowd, not the troll, bless him) can be laid squarely at the feet of Kesava Reddy. Jokes aside, NASSCOM should thank him for sending out their mail about the event to all the lists. I'm quite certain that over 70% of the crowd there showed up because of his forward - I for one certainly would never have heard of it if not for him. Thanks, dude!
So, a couple of things that I observed:
- Subash Menon, CEO and Sanjeev Gadre VP - Marketing of Subex Azure are both remarkably articulate. I don't just mean that in the Indian 'they speak good english' sense, but that they also speak well in the Toastmasters sense of the phrase. Smooth, enunciated, and with no ums-and-ahs. I've come to realise that this matters a lot, because when you speak like this, people tend to listen; they can't help themselves.
- In terms of engaging the audience though, Sanjay Anandram of Jumpstartup and Lin Chase of Accenture ruled. Sanjay because of his forthright and candid statements about VCs and entrepreneurs (refreshingly power point free too!), and Lin simply because of the way she articulated her own startup experiences in such a charming manner, especially the negative ones. In fact, for some reason Lin's way of talking reminds me a lot of Roy's style (Roy is ThoughtWorks' founder). I suspect it would be interesting to sit in on a conversation between the two of them.
- There was an overwhelming focus on B2B products. While the speakers did try to extrapolate and answer B2C questions, it would have been nice to have someone from say guruji.com or minglebox. I've picked these two names as examples simply because they've managed to raise significant VC funding, no mean feat in India.
- There was insufficient time to network. A huge portion of the value of such events is derived from the fact that you meet lots of interesting people. This is the single biggest reason why I'm a fan of Barcamp. Unfortunately, all the get-together-in-a-circle-and-talk-about-something had to be squeezed into the lunch break and the ten minute intervals between the sessions. A thirty minute break between each session would go a long way toward solving this problem.
That said, NASSCOM has done an excellent job and I'd sign up for the next such event without a second thought. I certainly had a good time and the food at the Leela was as good as I remember it to be from my TW bootcamp two years ago. I'd put on five kilos in the five weeks we spent in the Leela. But I digress...
In a nutshell, the fact that the right people were invited to speak at this gig made all the difference. I'm looking forward to the next one (we've been promised there will be more) and I hope the trend of bringing in experienced speakers continues.
PS: Some of the usual suspects at this event included my friends Akshat and Vidit, co-founders of Activ, Manish Agrawal, co-founder of picsquare.com, Venkat Ramana, CEO of OutSmart360 and Kesava Reddy of Digital Strait. And they're all under thirty. Go figure.
ThoughtWorks GeekNight: Meet Ola Bini (of JRuby) and Zheng Ye (of XRuby)
Ola Bini, core committer on the JRuby project is in Bangalore for a while. So is Zheng Ye, core committer on the XRuby project.
Here's your chance to learn more about JRuby, XRuby and related topics straight from the horse's mouth.
Briefly, JRuby allows us to run Ruby code - including Rails - on the Java JVM. XRuby is the first Ruby to Java compiler which compiles Ruby source code (.rb) to Java bytecode (.class)
If you're interested in meeting Ola and Zheng Ye, please sign up on the GeekNight wiki.
Date: Friday, 31st August
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: ThoughtWorks Bangalore. Here are the directions.
Bios:
Zheng Ye is a ThoughtWorker and the core developer of XRuby, which is a Ruby to Java bytecode compiler. He is from China. He used to work for Neusoft Group in Shenyang and worked on XRuby in his spare time. Currently, he is working for ThoughtWorks Studios, providing Ruby and JRuby services.
Ola Bini is a long time Java developer with a taste for alternative languages. He is from Sweden originally, but now lives in London. He used to work for Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and working on JRuby in his spare time. The last 3 months he has been working for ThoughtWorks Studios, providing Ruby and JRuby services for the rest of the company. Ola is one of the JRuby core developers. His book Practical JRuby on Rails will be published by APress in September.
Here's your chance to learn more about JRuby, XRuby and related topics straight from the horse's mouth.
Briefly, JRuby allows us to run Ruby code - including Rails - on the Java JVM. XRuby is the first Ruby to Java compiler which compiles Ruby source code (.rb) to Java bytecode (.class)
If you're interested in meeting Ola and Zheng Ye, please sign up on the GeekNight wiki.
Date: Friday, 31st August
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: ThoughtWorks Bangalore. Here are the directions.
Bios:
Zheng Ye is a ThoughtWorker and the core developer of XRuby, which is a Ruby to Java bytecode compiler. He is from China. He used to work for Neusoft Group in Shenyang and worked on XRuby in his spare time. Currently, he is working for ThoughtWorks Studios, providing Ruby and JRuby services.
Ola Bini is a long time Java developer with a taste for alternative languages. He is from Sweden originally, but now lives in London. He used to work for Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and working on JRuby in his spare time. The last 3 months he has been working for ThoughtWorks Studios, providing Ruby and JRuby services for the rest of the company. Ola is one of the JRuby core developers. His book Practical JRuby on Rails will be published by APress in September.
Seminar on DSLs, evolutionary testing and database refactoring
ThoughtWorks is organising a seminar on the next two Saturdays, in Bangalore (on the 19th) and Pune (on the 26th). We've had this one in the works for a bit and the philosophy behind it is interesting, so I figured I'd write about it.
Over the last few years, we've seen seminars and conferences sprout like mushrooms after a rain. Of these, only a handful happen in India and the vast majority are based around some famous figure (the first seminar we'd done, last year, had Martin Fowler as the chief attraction). The notable exception to this trend has been the Barcamps which totally kick ass, but all the corporate gigs remain the same - a big name or a product launch.
We figured we'd do something different - a seminar focused on the topics rather than the speaker, as well as one where the content as unbiased toward a particular implementation technology as is possible. This essentially implies that the content of the talks shouldn't be something you could just go off and google and figure out for yourself - and the only thing that really fits the bill is content which focuses on real, practical project experiences that we've had with a particular technology or idea.
With new ideas and technologies, this has always been a stumbling block. In the real world, with revenues and jobs at stake, one has to always exercise considerable caution before going ahead with implementing something new and untested on a live project. Usually, one has to wait for a couple of years before enough information has accumulated to make all the advantages and disadvantages of a particular idea or technology clear (and for it to lose the hype), thus making a decision feasible. It is this gap which we wanted to reduce, the period of time between people starting to blog about something new and people actually applying that something to live projects and deriving value from it.
Once all this had been thought through, identifying topics became a lot easier. We had a couple of areas where we'd taken on a bit of risk and tried some new stuff (right here in Bangalore, not something cool someone did half-way around the globe).
The first involves using DSLs, their advantages and disadvantages and their practical applications. DSLs are becoming quite popular, especially with the rise of Ruby, whose totally awesome syntax makes piggy-backing a DSL on the Ruby interpreter a breeze. As I mentioned earlier, all content is based on real projects we've done here and will be technology neutral, so while you'll see a fair amount of Ruby (the project from which this was sourced was a Ruby project), DSLs in Java and C# will also be covered. The person speaking, Srihari, worked on what was arguably India's first commercial Rails project, back in mid-2005. He's also the author of Migrator, an open source Java implementation of Rails' migrations.
Audience most likely to benefit: Developers, end users and organisations getting bespoke applications built to support their business
The second is on evolutionary automated testing. I've attended the dry runs of this talk - you'll be missing something if you miss this one. Vivek has written an open source functional testing tool for multi-threaded Swing apps called Frankenstein and is one of the guys behind gigpad.com. He's also going to be speaking at the Google testing conference later this year.
Audience most likely to benefit: Testers, Developers, Project Managers
Last but not least, we're importing Pramod from our US offices to talk about evolutionary database design. He's published a Jolt productivity award winning book on database refactoring. He's a respected speaker and author and the stuff he's done with databases was traditionally considered next to impossible - so his talk is certainly worth attending.
Audience most likely to benefit: DBAs, Developers, Project Managers
If you're interested in attending, you can sign up at twi.co.in. There's no registration fee.
Over the last few years, we've seen seminars and conferences sprout like mushrooms after a rain. Of these, only a handful happen in India and the vast majority are based around some famous figure (the first seminar we'd done, last year, had Martin Fowler as the chief attraction). The notable exception to this trend has been the Barcamps which totally kick ass, but all the corporate gigs remain the same - a big name or a product launch.
We figured we'd do something different - a seminar focused on the topics rather than the speaker, as well as one where the content as unbiased toward a particular implementation technology as is possible. This essentially implies that the content of the talks shouldn't be something you could just go off and google and figure out for yourself - and the only thing that really fits the bill is content which focuses on real, practical project experiences that we've had with a particular technology or idea.
With new ideas and technologies, this has always been a stumbling block. In the real world, with revenues and jobs at stake, one has to always exercise considerable caution before going ahead with implementing something new and untested on a live project. Usually, one has to wait for a couple of years before enough information has accumulated to make all the advantages and disadvantages of a particular idea or technology clear (and for it to lose the hype), thus making a decision feasible. It is this gap which we wanted to reduce, the period of time between people starting to blog about something new and people actually applying that something to live projects and deriving value from it.
Once all this had been thought through, identifying topics became a lot easier. We had a couple of areas where we'd taken on a bit of risk and tried some new stuff (right here in Bangalore, not something cool someone did half-way around the globe).
The first involves using DSLs, their advantages and disadvantages and their practical applications. DSLs are becoming quite popular, especially with the rise of Ruby, whose totally awesome syntax makes piggy-backing a DSL on the Ruby interpreter a breeze. As I mentioned earlier, all content is based on real projects we've done here and will be technology neutral, so while you'll see a fair amount of Ruby (the project from which this was sourced was a Ruby project), DSLs in Java and C# will also be covered. The person speaking, Srihari, worked on what was arguably India's first commercial Rails project, back in mid-2005. He's also the author of Migrator, an open source Java implementation of Rails' migrations.
Audience most likely to benefit: Developers, end users and organisations getting bespoke applications built to support their business
The second is on evolutionary automated testing. I've attended the dry runs of this talk - you'll be missing something if you miss this one. Vivek has written an open source functional testing tool for multi-threaded Swing apps called Frankenstein and is one of the guys behind gigpad.com. He's also going to be speaking at the Google testing conference later this year.
Audience most likely to benefit: Testers, Developers, Project Managers
Last but not least, we're importing Pramod from our US offices to talk about evolutionary database design. He's published a Jolt productivity award winning book on database refactoring. He's a respected speaker and author and the stuff he's done with databases was traditionally considered next to impossible - so his talk is certainly worth attending.
Audience most likely to benefit: DBAs, Developers, Project Managers
If you're interested in attending, you can sign up at twi.co.in. There's no registration fee.
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