Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Arun Gupta is a technology enthusiast, a passionate runner, and a community guy who works for Sun Microsystems.

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Thursday February 28, 2008

Sun Tech Days Hyderabad Talent Show Video - Day 2

Sun Tech Days are fun event where you learn a lot about different Sun technologies. A "fun fun" event in the agenda is a talent show where attendees get a chance to show their weirdest skill on the stage. A winner is decided by the audience applause and awarded a leather jacket. And it requires a lot of courage to do that in front of 5000 people, as was the case in Hyderabad Tech Days 2008. There were four participants who performed a variety of activities - yoga, reverse counting from 100 to 1, mimicry and singing.

Enjoy the video of this unique talent show and then decide who was the winner :)

Read more about what and why of talent show here.

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Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[4]

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Sun Tech Days Hyderabad - Day 1

30% of the approximately 5000 attendees at Sun Tech Days Hyderabad were a repeat audience. It is the biggest developer Tech Days of all - both in terms of the number of attendees and tracks/sessions. This is my first Tech Days in India and found the show to be quite impressive so far. Once you enter the main conference hall, it's hard to differentiate between Moscone Center (location for JavaOne) and Hyderabad International Convention Center (HICC). Starting from the entrance, conference rooms, audio/video facilities and the crew is just amazing and very helpful.

Here is a little video right before the opening session:

The main convention hall can accomodate upto 5000 people at a given time and it was packed for the opening keynote by Rich Green (Executive Vice President, Software, Sun Microsystems).

Rich described how JDK, MySQL (yaaay!), xVM, GlassFish, NetBeans, Solaris and many other similar offerings provide a comprehensive suite of products that cover the entire portfolio of software. He talked about how Sun Campus Ambassadors, one-fifth of the total approx 500 are from India, are playing a key role in shaping the future.

Rich also talked about "Innovate more, Code less" - basically talking about how providing incremental functionality over existing FOSS components foster the open source spirit and create a community. It can be measured by a ratio of the number of lines developed and used. Rich also talked about how MySQL (pronounced as my-ess-kew-ell) acquisition (completed earlier this week) has made Sun the largest open source company in the world.

And this is India, so of course lots of people show up at sessions, booths, lunch and every where else as well!

I participated in a technical showcase right after the keynote which demonstrates the latest & cool technologies from Sun Microsystems. There were lots of cool demos ranging from JavaFX, SunSPOT, Java2D & jMaki. A replay of the jMaki demo along with complete instructions to recreate is available here. The opening session was telecast live to Bangalore & Chennai and then there were other sessions conducted parallely as well in these cities.

In addition to the technical showcase, I delivered 2 more sessions - JavaEE, GlassFish & Their Future and Web 2.0 Applications Made Easy using jMaki. And a Hands-on-Lab on Performance Tuning your Web 2.0 Applications. Both the sessions were heavily attended with 45 minutes presentation and an equal amount of time answering the questions.

The evening concluded by a great performance by Euphoria - one of the most popular rock band in India. Their popularity was quite evident by response and participation from the audience. For me, it was quite exciting to attend an Indian rock concert after a looong time :)