Directi Corporate Blog

The Great Indian Developer Summit – this was one event we were most looking forward to. It promised to be 5 wholesome days of total tech immersion. Like any other conference, this one too, had its share of highs and lows.

We had to divide our time between interacting with people at the booth and attending sessions. The booth experience was really interesting – explaining to a variety of people what Directi does, what “Quit Working” (which was on front page of the Directi brochure) means. and playing a couple of boxing rounds on the Nintendo Wii (the prize for the winner of the Directi Treasure Hunt).

Now to the meaty stuff: the sessions we attended. The first session was on Building Great UX with .Net, conducted by Kalpesh Parmar. It was quite a disappointing session, to say the least. Kalpesh Parmar is the lead technical evangelist in India for Infragistics, Inc. While he explained the concept of User Experience, and how it is different from User Interface design, he did not delve into the related capabilities of .Net, and it seemed like a preamble for the next session on “Building LOBs Applications and Dashboards using Infragistics Components”. We decided to give the second session a miss, as it was clearly going to be a demo of the Infragistics component suite.

Next we attended a session that was somewhat misleadingly titled “Hone Your Coding Kung Fu with Best Practices”, by Jean Luc David. Jean Luc David is a Developer Advisor for Microsoft Canada and is the author of five books, including Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The content of this session was mostly a demonstration of the various features of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System rather than the best practices to be followed while coding, which would have been much more interesting.

We also attended two other sessions, one on ASP.Net MVC, and the other one on Silverlight 2.0 Deep Dive, both conducted by Todd Anglin. Todd Anglin is an active .NET community member, President of the North Houston .NET User Group, and Telerik’s Chief Technical Evangelist. Both his sessions were well planned and executed, and had a lot of very interesting, cutting edge technical content besides being peppered with fun trivia and anecdotes. The seminar hall was completely packed, with a lot of people having to sit on the stairs for lack of available seats. His interaction with the audience throughout the session kept us from dozing off (even though the Silverlight Deep Dive was a three hour marathon).

The session on Practical Semantic Web, by Jon Aizen was also quite interesting. Jon Aizen is co-founder and CTO at Dapper. In his session he described how Dapper advocates and implements a new approach to transform the existing web into a semantic web.

Another session that we were looking forward to attending was the Master Class on The elements of User Experience, conducted by none other than Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path, also known as the Father of Ajax. His book, The Elements of User Experience, has been called “brilliant” and “essential” and is considered one of the seminal works on user-centered design. While this session had some interesting content on the elements of user experience, he did not speak much about Ajax, which seemed to be what the audience was expecting.

Connecting the Worlds – Design/Development Collaboration using XAML, Expression and Silverlight, a session by Harish Ranganathan was a very basic, hello world demonstration of how Expression Blend and Visual Studio can be used for collaboration between the user interface designer and the software developer. They demonstrated memorabilia.hardrock.com to showcase the new DeepZoom technology in Silverlight. This presentation, although interestingly conducted, had very little technical content.

Personally, we found many sessions to be lackluster and vendor centric. The hands-on sessions on Silverlight by Todd Anglin from Telerik, .Net Gottchas by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam were worth its weight in gold and were the highlights of the three days we attended the Summit. Bhavin’s session (Building a Scalable Architecture for Web Apps) had a packed audience. People shot a lot of intelligent questions, which he handled in his ever energetic, crisp and without batting an eyelid style.

Also, you could have a look at the GIDS photographs on our Flickr stream.

-Co-authored by manoj.ku

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!