Saturday, July 18, 2009

Me spoke @ Eclipse India Summit '09

I had the oppurtunity to speak at the Eclipse India Summit 2009. Eclipse India Summit is an annual forum where Eclipse/Java developers across India (this time from Srilanka too) gather and discuss stuff. There will be sessions taken by ppl for the benifit of others. Sessions are normally on upcoming Eclipse technologies or a nicer way to do existing things. This year the forum was painted with a focus on Design Patterns and basics which is good coz not a lot of us get an oppurtunity to dig too deep when we start something. I took one such "emphasis on basics session" on Eclipse Modeling Framework. It was a joint session with me and my friend and ex-colleague Annamalai ... so we thought we'll do something different with the session ... which was for 3 hours!!! Yes the audience had to bear with us for 3 hours. We, instead of dividing the presentation content amongst ourselves wanted to be different - both of us were on stage and delivering the presentation like a dialogue. It was like Malai represented the new user or developer who's new task is to learn and do something out of EMF and i played the supposed know-something-about-EMF guy who went around answering his questions.
The session started off soon after a great lunch ... in an hall with real cozy ambience. The MC actually had to ask the ppl to stand up and had them stretching to make them alert. Then the session started off ... i was kinda petrified initialy looking at all those people eagerly waiting to take something out from the session ... the show went on frequently switching from the slides to showing running examples. We started off to a packed audience ... and finished to a packed audience. In the end both me and Malai were exhausted from all the talking and standing, but it felt good. Content and video of the slides will be uploaded soon (i m waiting with my fingers crossed.)