Directi Corporate Blog

We’re participating in the Great Indian Developer Summit that has started today. The event is spread across 5 days, with dedicated days for .net, richweb and java.

A lot of people from Directi have been looking forward to this event - since it seems to have some really good speakers, and we’re confident that the information shared will be quite interesting. Bhavin is going to be talking about Builiding a Scalable Architecture for Web Apps, and Naresh is conducting a workshop on Acceptance Test Driven Development.

We have also created an online treasure hunt contest for the event attendees, and it has been received extremely well. Every now and then you will find somebody out here sitting on their laptop (or even at our booth) and trying to crack the puzzle. Obviously one of the reasons might be because of what’s at stake – a Nintendo Wii.

In case you are on twitter, you could follow us: http://twitter.com/directi.

We’ll also soon be adding photographs of this event on our Flickr stream.

Last week we attended the Web Innovation 2008 Conference which was held at the Grand Hyatt. The conference focused on Web 2.0 and had 3 tracks directly related to its evolution, namely Business, Enterprise, and of course the Technology Track.

Bhavin and Naresh were invited as speakers, and held an interactive session that described their experiences in adopting Agile development philosophies and practices at Directi; titled ‘Our Journey Down the Yellow Brick Road (Agile Devlopment practices)‘. This presentation covered the importance of Agile, the different practices we have adopted at Directi, as well as an insight in to the road ahead. Some of the practices that Bhavin and Naresh discussed were Daily Standup Meetings, Weekly Iterations & Monthly Releases, and eXtreme Programming. Just before their session they alsoparticipated in a BoF discussion on REST vs. SOAP.

The conference was conducted smoothly, but somehow the information and knowledge shared seemed to be restricted to application demos only. Having said that, some of the demos were fantastic, and very useful for the software development community.

We will also be participating in the Great Indian Developers Summit. In the meantime, you could also check out Web Innovation snaps on our Flickr stream.  

Directians have always loved being at BarCamps, and for the past couple of times we’ve sponsored camps at Bangalore and Mumbai. This time around the event was spread across two days at IIM Bangalore. The sessions were a mixed bag of sorts - with some interesting tracks on startups, and a session on RIA, and some that digressed towards social issues.

Right from its origin, BarCamp has always been a good forum to collaborate and share knowledge on web applications and also discuss several open source technologies. This time some of the sessions showed facts (lesser known, of course) about the Kamasutra and Panchatantra, poetry, and even online dating. But some of the geeks didnt take nicely to this break from technology

From Directi, the people that took sessions were Bhavin, Naresh, and Sandeep, about the benefits of Automated testing, Agile development and REST.

This time, as usual we got to meet a really interesting mix of people, and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone at the next barcamp.

One of the most important landmarks in Directi’s history will be the day we move into DirectiPlex, the unofficial codename for our new building in Andheri East. While it has been spoken about plenty of times, as a Directian you just can’t get enough of the new office. It houses about 1700 people, and will have several amenities including a gym, spa, gaming zone and even a bowling alley!

So when the idea of visiting the ‘under construction’ version was put forth, it was obviously well received. To be able to trek across the basement and then its multiple storeys and visualize what we have seen in 3D graphic images, was an opportunity that got several people excited.

The experience was absolutely unforgettable! Sitting on tiny rocks and concrete (on what we counted as the 6th floor), and humming tunes performed by a group of music enthusiasts (more fondly referred to as the Directi band) was fascinating. After that, we spray painted the walls and pillars with everything from ip addresses to the amateur version of the Mona Lisa. The trip came to an end with a tour of the entire building - leaving all of us even more excited to start working there.

Don’t forget to see the pics of our office trip put up on Flickr!