The venue (Impetus Tech) was great with very comfortable atmosphere for discussions & presentations. The venue was split into three separate rooms, where sessions & demonstrations were held in parallel. The cafeteria was dedicated to content/blog related sessions, the main hall was where all the techie sessions were held & the lounge was used for demonstrations. The organizers were very actively monitoring the time slots for a session & ensured that sessions were progressing as planned earlier that day.
From the sessions I attended, I found the following ones useful
a) Planning Poker by Vineet Tyagi (Impetus) – Vineet Introduced us with a nice way to estimate software completion dates. It was based on Agile Methodology and involves around giving a rating to a task and then re-adjusting the dates (if required) after the first task is completed. The technique demonstrated looked very easy & logical. I am hoping to practice it in the next assignment that I work on.
b) Amazon Cloud computing (Jinesh Varia) – This session was liked by all who attended it. It introduced Amazon’s Ec2 & S3 services which provide storage & computing resources on the web. After the session, I have added a TODO item for my self to check them out in more detail.
c) Ruby Insights (Sur at Vinsol) – This was an introduction to Ruby. I was and am planning to experiment with Ruby and Sur provided a good introduction to the same. I’m sure that many others in the crowd would have also enjoyed this session.
Besides the tech sessions there was also a good discussion with Avinash (routeguru) where in he shared his thoughts & vision for routeguru & other similar applications in India. GIS Applications were discussed in detail in this session.
Overall it was great fun to be there & I congratulate the organizers for making this a success.