Wednesday, July 14, 2010:
DevCamp Chennai 2010 took place on July 10th at the ThoughtWorks Chennai office. This one-day unconference, which was the first DevCamp to be held in Chennai, was a huge success. It provided developers, architects, CTOs, and independent consultants from across the country with a platform to share their opinions on the latest technologies.
|
|
DevCamp Chennai had more than 150 attendees from over 55 companies and 5 colleges. The event was co-sponsored by ThoughtWorks, OrangeScape and Zoho. ThoughtWorks has organised DevCamps in its Bangalore and Pune offices in the last two years. This year, it instituted the Innovation & Technology Trust, a public non-profit with the objective of providing a support system and networking between professionals in the field of emerging technologies and open-source by bringing them together during workshops, seminars, conferences and unconferences.
One of the speakers, Shwetank Dixit, said: "I've been to around 20 DevCamps around the country, and this is the biggest turnout I've seen. The topics were extremely interesting, and I was very impressed with some of the speakers. What surprised me about ThoughtWorks was that they didn't just co-sponsor the event; they actively involved themselves in every aspect, from hosting it at their office premises to giving talks to providing free WiFi, which is something we geeks love. It was extremely well organised."
There were 14 interactive sessions conducted throughout the day, with topics ranging from Design Patterns to Open Source Hardware to Functional Programming in JavaScript. Sessions such as "Developing Scalable Solutions on the AWS Cloud" by Raghuraman (8KMiles), "The Open Web Stack and the Future of Web Development" by Shwetank Dixit (Opera Software), "Text Mining" by Sudarsun Santhiappan (Burning Glass Technologies) and "Browser Security Model" by ThoughtWorker Sriram Narayan were big hits. There were a number of fishbowl sessions, and the day closed on a high note with a Lightning Talk.
Mani Doraisamy, CTO of OrangeScape Technologies, stated, "Most of the tech events I've been to have been business-oriented, rather than
technology-oriented. This is the first developer-friendly event I've been to. All the speakers were extremely knowledgeable, and the sessions were interactive, which one doesn't see very often at these events. There needs to be more opportunities for members of the technical community to get together, network and share ideas, and DevCamp Chennai is a great start."
Talking about the success of DevCamp, Ketan Hajarnavis, General Manager of ThoughtWorks Chennai, said, "ThoughtWorks has always been a huge supporter of, and active participant in tech conferences, community events and unconferences in India and around the globe, but this was a first-time event for Chennai. The turnout exceeded our expectations, the energy levels and enthusiasm were staggering, and the quality of speakers and topics was very impressive. There was knowledge sharing and networking among members of the software development community, and I'm pleased that ThoughtWorks was instrumental in facilitating an event of this scale."
|