Megyaan

Nov=Flex-ed ! December 14, 2008

It’s finally happened,I’ve been bitten by the “proverbial” writer’s block …

There have been too many things happening in my life over the past month and usually I would love to share the experiences over my posts but suddenly,I seem to be aloof about what is happening around me …November was quite literally an “eventful” month.We attended a very interesting “Women in Technology “ conference conducted by IBM on the 3^rd .

The major event which we all looked forward to was the “Flex Boot Camp” that happened on Nov 7^th,8^th .There was a lot of preparation that went into making this event a huge success 🙂

Raghu and Bhavana have pretty much written everything about the event in their blogs ..but lemme narrate to you all, my side of the story 🙂

We realised the magnitude of people who will be involved in this event only after our first meeting with the guys(Raghu,Pravin,Ramesh) from Adobe . They were very clear about their agenda,the crowd numbers and hoped to reach out to a very wide student audience that would really enjoy learning,working on and exploring Flex .

It was decided that it would be an inter-collegiate event .So our first task was to publicize the event in as many colleges as possible and how did we do that ? Prateek took the task of drawing up a list of around 25 colleges . He categorised them zone-wise and we got about 4 zones.Each zone was assigned about 6 colleges. Then we decided to cover all the colleges in 3 days flat . Each one of us choose a particular zone and had to visit the respective colleges .

Armed with Posters,Publicity material,Event Schedules and a lot of enthusiasm,I set off with Suhas to visit 3 colleges on the first day . We went to Sapthagiri College of engineering .The college is a good 7-8 km (I suppose!) drive from MSRIT . We reached Sapthagiri only to realise the students were busy writing internals ! There was no way we could go to each class and make announcements and take on-the-spot registrations..We spoke to the CSE,ISE and ECE Hod’s who offered great support and gave us their contact numbers to co-ordinate later .Once the event date drew closer,we got a record number of queries from Sapthagiri about the event ,making us realise that the teachers had lived upto their word of informing all the students about the event .

Our next stop was Sri Krishna Institute of Technology(SKIT) .I met a PUC friend of mine in the college and she helped me spread the word around .The first question that everyone wanted to know was “WHAT IS FLEX?” Lemme admit here,even I did not know anything much about flex,except for these statements that were kinda like my USP —”Flex is a frame-work for developing Rich Internet Applications.Adobe in association with MSRIT is conducting a Flex Boot Camp on the 7^th n 8^th of November at MSRIT.It is a 2 day event,On day 1,there will be an entire walkthrough on Flex,complete with demonstrations,tutorials and working,end of day1 is the test,after which 100 students will be screened through for a Contest on day2.At the Contest ,students would be expected to develop a Flex application.Prize money is 30,20 and 10k along with lunch,breakfast.Tshirts and goodies also to be given to all participants! “ I said this like a mantra non-stop for the 2 days that I visited all the colleges . I wanted everyone to give it a shot ,How will a student learn about new technologies if he doesnt explore such opportunities ,Right ?So I was literally like a sales-person talking non-stop about Flex for the 2 days 🙂 My final line to the students who were apprehensive about visiting MSRIT was “You just reach MSRIT,we shall take care of the rest!” The response from SKIT was phenomenal ! We got about 50 teams registered from all the 3 departments and the teachers were also interested in participating in the event.I was really thrilled at the response though there was a slight dilemma about how many people would actually turn up!

We visited Acharya Institute of Technolgy next and the same thing happened to us there ,as at Sapthagiri. Students were busy writing internals ,but the Hod’s made sure that they put up the posters on the notice board right in our presence .I was satisfied that atleast everybody could take a look at it and check out the website .Yeah,this site is something I would never forget “http://www.msritflexbootcamp.eventbrite.com” .I also goofed up here by giving out Prateek’s number on all the posters to contact for any details . 2 days before the event,he was bombarded with calls and perplexed as to how his number had gotten through so many people ! I was the culprit 🙂 And I did apologise to him.

Day2 -Me,Bhavana,Suhas,Anmol and Mansa set off to visit 2 more colleges that are pretty farflung from where we all stay.Thanks to Anmol who is always ready to arrange conveyance at even the slightest notice !

We went to Dr.Ambedkar Institute of Technolgy,It’s a huge campus with lot of greenery and is pretty serene. Here we encountered a different problem,There was a FOSS event going on in their collge and most of the pre-final and final year students were attending it . We spoke to a teacher there who graciously allowed us to talk about the event to a crowd of nearly 200 students,Direct marketing ! I took the mike and rattled off my USP 🙂 Best part,people dedicatedly wrote down the website and even registered later. We also managed to find a student- Angelica who would later co-ordinate with us.I must admit Angelica did a great job of informing all the students about the event and was directly responsible for the fantastic crowd that turned up from Dr.AIT.

Last stop was East West Institute of Technology. 2 of my cousins are currently final year students there and so I was pretty happy to visit the college. Again ,the same story of internals 😦 but we managed to go to most of the classrooms and personally talk to students about the event and take down some registrations 🙂 Exhausted we left and called it a day.

The next task was to feed all the on-the-spot registrations onto the site,Narendra did most of this work 🙂 I shot off a mail to all the students who had registered with me about the event details since I had their e-mails.

There was a lot more mayhem that happened after this,Registrations exceeded the number of seats available and we got a lot of panic calls.Angelica from Dr.AIT was really worried if all the students from her college would be able to partcipate .Thanks to Bhavana who pressed the Panic button and Raghu,from Adobe, in turn increased the number of seats to another 100.

What follwed was absolute mayhem on the day of the event .To read about what actually happened at the event,Visit Bhavana’s blog and Raghu’s blog

This event will remain one of my best memories at MSRIT .We learnt a lot about Organising,co-ordinating,Marketing,Problem-solving,Made new friends,Met a whole lot of talented people . Also look forward to a continued association with Adobe .Harish,Raghu,Anirudh,Sujith,Anand,Ramesh and Ananth lived upto all the expectations from the students and interacted non-stop for 2 days with all the students.Everyone went back home with a 🙂 on their faces and <mx> in their heads .Day2 was an absolute delight to watch with the students asking questions non-stop while building apps and the entire team from Adobe guiding them with a lot of enthusiasm .Congratulations to CMRIT who emerged Champions bagging the First and Third places while Global Institute of Technology won the second place.Three cheers !Thanks to all our teachers,HOD and Shashidhar Sir for giving the task of organizing this event to the Ignite Team once more 🙂

PS:The only sad part being I was compering in one hall and could only get to understand what was happening on stage in bits and pieces thanks to the umpteen calls and complete confusion 🙂 I’m pretty much making up for it now,Have been trying out some very cool Air app’s and there is this really awesome site called babbel.com built entirely on Flex which blew me away.Do check it out !