Vijay Tatkar's Blog

How to get mobbed, part 1. aka SunTech Days, Hyderabad, India, day 1
[ed: I had posted this internally; it was well received and several asked me to post it to my blog as well, so here goes. I was going to post an edited version in a day or two, but I'll just post it as I see it for now. Day 2 version coming up tomorrow]
Its OK to preface all of this with: India is a populous country!
As it turns out, SunTech Days had a record attendance of 4200 for Rich Green's keynote address (boy, was he pleased! When I talked to him after his preso, he was thrilled, esp. when he compared it to Seattle which had 1 zero and a factor of 2 missing from that number). The huge room was packed and the crowd dutifully lapped all he had to say and the engineering rapid-fire 4minute demos that followed. Yes, Roman's demo came across very well: geeky, deep, ideal chow for hackers there.
In the Solaris track, Jim Hughes (Sun Fellow, Storage security and all around fun guy) had a successful keynote. He got the crowd especially excited by the end of his preso and questions were furiously flying back and forth until he had to be literally cut off. I should have known then, that I was in trouble!
My preso was literally a Q&A session with me making a feeble attempt at presenting slides :-) The questions were from all directions and all backgrounds and answering them was a challenge of sorts, but one that I relished and perhaps the crowd did too. I too ran over and Frank  (Curran, who ran the Solaris Track) indicated to the audience that I could finish my last two slides, but they were not obligated to stay, since lunch was already being served. Amazingly enough, even after I had finished my preso and focussed on even more questions and answers, fewer than half in the audience walked out. I ought to be thrilled that they preferred talking to me over lunch! I was literally mobbed when I turned the Q&A into a more 1-1 event. Alexander and Roman("Yellow Submarine" Shaposhnik), who were in the crowd at this stage, were clearly very amused and instead of helping me out, they took pictures :-) :-) [Just kidding, Roman and Alexander!]
Quite an experience. But by no means a unique one. The tools and Solaris pod where we were was constantly crowded and Alexander, Roman and I never had a spare moment.
I'm amazed at some of the misunderstandings that this crowd came with and did my best to clarify it as clearly as I could. Heres a sampling:

• Does Solaris have a UI. How friendly is it? [A: do you use Linux? Are you familiar with Gnome. Its the same Gnome. Come, try it out on my laptop here]
• Netbeans vs. CDP vs. SunStudio [A: It uses the same source base underneath. CDP is a C/C++ customization. No, Studio compilers are NOT available on Windows, but CDP is,etc]
• How hard is it for me to get Solaris Network certification
• I want to do college project (you have to be careful not to use "school" here; school means upto high school. Higher education is "college") on Solaris and/or compilers, how do I do that [A: There is an active University program being set up; theres a talk tomorrow, come and attend that; you'll get lots of useful nuggets there]
• Isnt Solaris a mainframe OS. [A: Look at my laptop; its running Solaris just fine]. Why doesnt everyone know that Solaris does desktops as well?
• How can we get students to learn Solaris in their college programs [A: look at variants of the University program, above. Plus, Solaris in course material, etc] Lots of discussions on how they would like to collaborate on research; "can you suggest some related topic areas" [A: Glad you asked: and I rattled off half a doz off the top of my head. Lets go look at what the University programs can do.
• How come Linux is so popular when Solaris seems to have everything and looks quite nice and has all these great features that Linux doesnt [A: we're asking for your help to make Solaris overtake Linux, now that you know whats in it]

and of course,the obligatory questions on

• How does Sun make money if you give the SW away for free (A: services, learning, longterm customer engagement so maybe the NEXT machine you buy will be a Sun machine, etc, etc).

Lots of very basic Solaris questions and turning the discussion to Linux that they are often familiar with, makes it easier to put it in context. Then you can point out the differentiators and strengths of Solaris. I was also amazed at the number of students in the audience... much more than in any past event.
But we were constantly mobbed with questions like these. Quite a different experience from other SunTech days!
We later learned that for the music program at the end of the day, Rich was mobbed by a crowd 10-deep and he needed help from organizers to get out of that large hall.

All in all, this is proving to be Mobfest 2007. Oh, and by the numbers (we went around at the end of the day to see the tally of attendees for each session)
Solaris track had between 300 to 550 attendees (in Hyderabad alone; there were more in remote sites). The Java tracks had in the range of about 1000. Totally, we counted that the 4 tracks together had about 3500+ attendees on an average throughout the day. Those are impressive numbers! Posted by tatkar ( Feb 22 2007, 08:49:16 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]