Abdul Qabiz on Web Technologies, Flash Platform, RIA, India

One more day to go for Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010, I am very excited about this event because of so many good sessions and speakers.

More importantly, an opportunity for me to reconnect with everyone. Flash Platform community in India has grown many folds during last couple of years, so it would be fun to see new developers/designers.

This is going to be first event I would be attending after mid 2008. I have been busy doing very different things (bootstraping team, hiring, strategy, setting up processes, etc.), hence don't have much to share about Flash Platform related things. I have done bunch of small actionscript/flex projects, where as my team has been busy building some cool stuff using web-standards and lamp-stack.

If you are going to be around, let's catch up.

I still remember the day, when Jon Boutelle shared his idea of organizing first BarCamp in India (i.e. New Delhi) and wanted to know, if we (Manish Jethani and I) can connect him to someone at Adobe Noida for venue. Then the first BarCampBangalore, how idea started and how some of us met initially to plan, though I had to drop out just before event due to health reasons.

I must say, I have been fortunate to be part of some of the first events in India, be it Bangalore or Pune.

I really miss events like BarCamp in Kanpur, hence been planning to organize BarCampKanpur, if I can find more like-minded people and collaborate with them. Last year, I sent an email to couple of mailing-lists (including BarCampBangalore) to share the idea and request contacts, if any, who can help us.

Thanks to all those who sent me offline emails and shared the contacts from their connections. I tried to reach out couple of those but it didn’t work out. I couldn’t really follow up a lot.

Today, I decided to create wiki-page for BarCampKanpur and a google-group (mostly for mailing-list purpose for planners and volunteers). Following are the details:

• BarCampKanpur – Wiki
• barcamp-kanpur – Mailing List

I am very positive, we would soon have some volunteers to plan and organize the event. Venue should not be problem, I can manage to get one easily for first event and perhaps later.

Once we have some volunteers, we plan to have some meetup in local cafes or anywhere to talk about things (get to know each other, plan the event, share the responsibilities, etc).

Please spread the word and participate, if you can.

BugQuash is a great initiative to bring Flex community together to contribute in various ways (bug filing, fixing, patching, etc) to OpenSource Flex SDK.

I am sure, you must have heard about last BugQuash which was organized last month, by Flex community members: Nate Beck and Marty Mickelson.

Hundreds of community members participated including me.

I submitted some patches, which are not big ones, but I got a lot of appreciation from teams within Adobe and other people from community. It suggests that even small contributions matter, hence I should be contributing more often.

Dave Story (VP Developer Tools, Adobe Systems) sent some pictures from one of the all-hands meeting, where BugQuash was discussed, where entire team, along with Dave, thanked to each contributor for their contributions over phone.

Thanks to everyone who organized and participated. It helped me to get started contributing, which I always wanted to do. I am going to try to contribute as often as I can.

Update:Next BugQuash is happening on May 17, 2009. Check out BugQuash for more details.
Update: BugQuash on May 17, 2009 was successful and your truely submitted two patches

Technorati Tags: bugquash, flex, opensource

It was good to be at initRIA, I met many (known or new) people. The event went fine, we had some good sessions. The following list was the agenda:-

• Data Visualization in Flex – Raghunath Rao, Adobe
• Flash for Flex developers – Bhavin Padhiyar, SAP
• RIAjaxified – Rakshith, Adobe
• Designing RIAs with RC pattern – Yash Mody, TeknoPoint Multimedia
• Building Live Documents – An online Office suite leveraging RIA technologies by Sumanth Raghavendra and Adarsh Kini, InstaColl
• Optimizing Flex and AS3 – Mrinal Wadhwa, SAP
• Developing Flex RIAs with Cairngorm Microarchitecture Debabrata Acharjee, CapGemini
• Birds of a feather

We had couple of more session and some discussions (on Silverlight, AJAX etc) along with the above listed ones. I enjoyed most of the session, there is always something to learn. The most interesting session was by InstaCol guys, who showed us Live-Documents and also shared their experience with Adobe Flex.

I hope, all the slides/presentations (by everyone) would be uploaded to slideshare (preferably) or somewhere.

Around 130+ people were expected to attend (based on registration count) but it seems some fifty people showed up, which is not bad for something that was planned and organized in such a short time-span.

I feel, this is the first event, in India, which is focussed on the Flash Platform at the same time open for talks/discussions on all kind of RIA technologies. I am sure, next time (whenever it happens) we would have enough time to spread the word and developers from different RIA technology background can come up and share their views. As said, it was cool we had discussions on AJAX, Silverlight, AIR, Flex, Flash and RIA in general.

I managed to click some photographs, not really good quality due to my impatient and lazy nature since I have moved to Bangalore .Check out photographs.

Thanks to Mrinal Wadhwa of Bangalore FUG for taking the initiative and organizing the event. Thanks to Honeywell guys for a good venue with all facilities.

Technorati tags: initria

There are more seats available for initRIA event, if you have not yet registered, you can register here. You can read more details on Mrinal’s blog.

Two more days to go and I am already excited to meet everyone. I hope, I would get well by then.

Technorati tags: initria

Bangalore Flex User Group, precisely Mrinal Wadha, is organizing initRIA on Dec 16, 2007. Haven’t heard about it? Please read the details.

I hope to see good crowd and sessions there.

Technorati tags: initria, ria