Apache and Microsoft have been working quite closely. Both on a win-win situation.  Microsoft treats Apache as their technical research and Apache treats Microsoft as a support for building and taking technologies to another level. This is one collaboration which I really like.. Any open source foundation if backed by a Big Fish is a major success.  Most committers are on a job in their respective companies and working dedicated for Apache! Why? Because the company they work for uses apache products heavily

The event was a 2 day Barcamp & 3 day ApacheCon together. 2-6 November at Marriott Conventional Center , City Center of Oakland. Oakland is pretty cheap compared to San Francisco. Nothing much to see here apart from a good lake(which I missed). You might want to avoid going to West Oakland. Google for “How not to get shot in Oakland”.

The conference had speakers and committers from all around the globe. For those of you who don’t know who a committer. He is a person who will do the actual release and commit the code. Contributers from anywhere can submit code and patches, Its the job of a committer to do the release. There are more than 5-6 committers per project. At least 2-3 committers should review one another’s code and agree to the release of the code so that the release is watched by more than a single eye!

A good project in apache has a good adoption rate. For example Apache Tomcat for Java servlet has a 10,000 downloads per day! And the figures are like this and increasing over the last two years! Now that’s something cool.. ain’t it?

Its the 10th year of the Foundation. Apache has grown to a full scale Open Source foundation which has not only proved that Open source works! , but its processes and operations has made a mark on how an organization should run. Hats Off to you guys! Everything is very process oriented in Apache. They have very formal structure like any other company, but with a major touch of community development.

After all , social networking and community development is all that matters in the end.

Here are some pictures from my trip.

My Flight was from Calcutta, India to Kunming, China. From Kunming a local flight to GuangZhou.

I really liked GuangZhou. Nice climate, nice young people! I was there to attend 105th International Import Export fair. Its not mykinda game of business altogether but I agreed to it thinking what’s the harm to explore.

I rather describe the entire visit in pictures.

Canton Fair Ground

Opening ceremony

Fair Grounds

Costs only USD 5000

Area surrounding the fair

Speaking on stage — software imports

felicitation

Pretty Girls dance show

Shopping in GuangZhou

Fun!

From GuangZhou I went to HK and then back to Kunming. Overall it was a nice short trip and the fair was quite interesting!

I will be talking about a framework on mobile phones and the topic is:
Building Enterprise Mobile applications without programming.

Some interesting topics I’d like to listen to:

Microsoft Windows Mobile Development – Mayur Tendulkar
Rapid Robotics Development using Microsoft Robotics Studio – Nikhil Dandeker
Mobility application development with moblin – Sachin Kelkar Intel
Performance Tunning on Application Server -Tara Lodh

I am attending PHP Camp on 20th Sept 2008. I will be presenting on

PHP Vs Java:But I love them both…

BarCampPune4 is coming up yet again! This time on 16th Feb @ ThoughWorks. I will be speaking but haven’t yet decided on the topic.

I am excited!

For more details:http://barcamp.org/BarCampPune4

On 13th October Teknowledge Software conducted the first “Free for All” Open Source Web Technology conference called WebOSS ’07.

The event was the first of its kind to be held in Kolkata. Teknowledge Software, a software house based in Kolkata hosted the event along with WBUT as the venue sponsor.

Volunteers dressed in white T-shirts with WebOSS ’07 logo worked hard to put the event together.

The event started at around 11:30. I was the first one to speak and spoke on RIA: Which technology one should choose? Slides can be found here

I attended the next session by Pradeep on how to build application with AJAX. Pradeep’s presentation can be found here

There was a lunch break after this which contained burgers, cakes, ladoo! and Frooti!

The next session was of Shabbir’s on Speeding up your websites. A great session which included tips and tricks to speed up the sites from network and client browser point of view. Shabbir’s content can be found here

The next session was of Naveen. He really went dirty into the code like Pradeep. It was really a good session and I have started respecting Perl (i’m more a PHP Guy!)

It was a good conference, the jam packed audience was eager to know more and more!

Overall, a fun event like barcamps! Its great to see such events happening in Kolkata! Go ahead Kol!

You can find ALL pictures here:

Hussain on RIA

Pradeed, Naveen and Shabbir

Jam Packed Audience

Pradeep, Naveen and Shabbir again.

The event that attracted many students and IT professionals from Pune was very well organized and had a lot of good sessions. I myself conducted many installation sessions of Linux for novices on day one. I also managed to catch up some interesting sessions like “RIA with Lazlo” by Vijay Khambalkar and Debugging apps with GNU Debugger” by Prakash Varandani and some glimpses of jam packed session of Network Security by Atul Kahate.

The evening has a wonderful Networking Party at Symbiosis Institute of Management Sciences-SIMS poolside. Dinner was quite good with some interesting talks with Mr.Narain who had come from Chennai. I also managed to get a good number of pictures along with other volunteers.

Day two started with my workshop on LAMP(Linux Apache, MySQL and PHP) along with Gaurav Pant. It was a 2 hour workshop which lasted for over 3 hours. The very thing that surprised me was there were more number of people who were turned down due tounavailability of space. Instead of Gaurav and me taking simultaneous sessions, two separate tracks could have solved the problem. May be next year!

After I finished with my workshop, I managed to get into two more sessions: “Identity Management” by Pradeep Sinha and “Backup Management” by Anand Bhalve.

I really liked this product Amanda which Anand talked about. I was wondering to create a UI for that! At the end I attended Matt Barker’s session on the next version of Ubuntu called “Feisty Fawn”. He was like a rock star with all girls going crazy about having a photograph with him!

There were many sessions that I missed due to my own workshop.Session that I MISSED and REGRET were like of Tony Wasserman about “Management of Open Source Projects”, “Open Solaris” by “Moinak Ghosh”. Hopefully I will get to see them on the video recording.

Day-2 ended with a photo shoot of all the volunteers.

At the end, another successful event! Hope to see the same next year!