Let me start by bragging about it! Yeah! I spoke at JSFoo 2012, Bangalore. I submitted my proposal for the talk a few months back, because JSFoo was one of the places where I would get to meet people and interact with them freely, and its JavaScript! You can find my slides here. The theme of this year’s JSFoo was “JavaScript Everywhere” and I was quite lucky that my talk actually got through, and I got a chance to deliver a public talk (discarding the ones we have at tour Programming Club in college) to a tech-oriented audience with similar interests.
My bad luck, that I had my midsem exams and I missed the first day of the conference. I still curse my midsems for that, because after having talked to plenty of people I understood that the first day was wonderful and atleast I shouldn’t have missed the Beer.js party at any cost! I should have listened to Zainab and bunked my exams (they weren’t that great either).
Anyways I ended up in Bangalore early morning for the second day. Met up with an old school friend early. Then came to NIMHANS in well before the scheduled time. It wasn’t long before the stalls were put up at the venue for the day and the crowd started pouring in! Frankly speaking, the guys at Hasgeek are wonderful and the setup they had got for the conference was awesome – from NFC powering the conference registration to people sharing contact details with the same card! Suddenly NIMHANS felt like it was cool place for having a conference.
The day was started by Raj’s keynote, and how JavaScript was breaking all device barriers and how it was being used in different scenarios from browser, to applications to servers and how people were “pushing the boundary of what’s possible”. My talk was next. Last minute before my talk, I connect the projector to my VGA port and I find my VGA port is not working properly. The Hasgeek guys were extremely helpful and tried their best to help me with the issue and keep the talk going. Moved on with one of their laptops, had some issues with the projector but still delivered the talk, but without the demos (reason being that the demos were set up to run on my laptop). Everything went well and I finished on time. Next was Nagarjuna’s talk about WebRTC. I found a fellow Mozilla Contributor, and very soon we guys were talking to each other.
Lunch was the time when you get to interact freely with so many developers out there. I talked to few, learning what they were doing, and I learnt about a few startups and what kind of technologies they were using to increase productivity. Next was Varunkumar Nagaranjan’s talk, and I never knew that so many tools even existed just to debug JavaScript, he just walked us through all the Chrome Developer Tools swiftly. In the next talk, I came to know about APIfy, a nifty tool that turns well formatted data so often found in websites into APIs and how to build apps with it.
Worth mentioning is Sunil’s talk on animating HTML elements. I just loved the fact that how he wrapped hard to understand concepts of animation, in such jolly words. And we also had his expressions and clap-your-feet in the air to entertain us! No wonder I tweeted to him
The day ended with Sudar telling us how to control bots with JavaScript via Node.js! It was the session that perhaps I’ll remember for my life, how he allowed random people from the audience to control the bot on stage. The bot ran on an Arduino and was controlled by Node.js running on his laptop.
I also met Gaurav and Aravind, alumni of IIT Kharagpur, the founders of a startup called Askabt. Nagarjuna and I had a nice talk to them. Since I dodn’t have a place to stay for the night, I decided to stay back at their office and have a “hacknight” of my own, going through their library called Resql‘s code (and of course enjoying their free wifi). Next morning was also fun to hangout with those guys and we had breakfast (or I should rather say brunch) together. It was a nice opportunity to interact with these people and learn about how things go on in the real world when you startup.
Afternoon was my flight from Bangalore. I wanted to stay back. Bangalore was such a nice city to be in. People whom I didn’t even know before gave me shelter in their office for a night! I made some good friends – Nagarjuna, Gaurav, Aravind, Shreyank and Jaison. After all thats what conferences are for, getting to know people. Hats off to Hasgeek and other guys – Kiran, Zainab, Sunil who helped in organizing such a brilliant event! Would like to attend events like this more often. (And forgive me if I missed somebody’s name)
The Limbeck 