Attending meetups pertaining to the current developments in technology and the Open Source domain has become more of a habit for me over the years. Though this might have been the first time that I attended two meetups on the same weekend.
Jabong had hosted a MongoDB Meetup at their office in Gurgaon on Friday. It was a good event which witnessed decent participation. The keynote was given by Jabong employees who managed to port part of their website to a RaspberryPi via MongoDB. There were a couple of sessions about the applications & issues of MongoDB.
While it was great to meet new people, it was equally delightful to see the old faces. One of them happened to be Anshul Sharma, a Jamia Millia Islamia alumnus. He informed me about the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Meetup that was scheduled for the next day in his (former) college.
Tiring as my day was, I decided to attend the GSOC meetup anyways, and I most definitely don't regret the decision. Soon after reaching the venue in the morning, I was informed by one of the organizers that a slot is open for a speaker, in case I wanted to give a talk. Having already spoken at several of the smaller workshops for students of my own college, I jumped at the chance.
The event began with sessions by several GSOCers (current & former), who talked about their GSOC projects, their respective organizations and their contributions.
The organizers went the extra mile to make the event as interactive as possible, and to keep the audience interested. For this purpose, they had several goodies from Google. So at the end of each talk, the speaker asked a couple of questions, and the audience members with the correct answers got those goodies.
Right after lunch, Anshul gave a hands-on about Git, which was greatly appreciated by those who were unaware of the awesomeness of version control systems. Next was my turn. I had decided to talk about IPython Notebook and using it, give a tutorial on Python basics. There were around 100 people in the auditorium at that point.
I was equal parts nervous and excited as my usual audience didn't exceed 40. I began by interacting with the audience for a few minutes to break the ice and avoid making the session too boring.
It turned out that many of them had a basic idea of Python, but not many of them had heard about IPython Notebook. This was kind of good news (for me).
After my talk, I was overwhelmed to see the enthusiasm of the audience, as a lot of people jumped up with questions. It was great to find that people found my talk interesting. After clearing their doubts, I asked a bunch of questions and some lucky guys got some cool Google goodies.
Towards the end of the event, the organizers, several of whom are GSOCers themselves, gave a presentation about making it to GSOC, and explained the whole process in detail.
Then came the lucky draw, and two lucky winners got a GSOC T-shirt each. Also, all the speakers got certificates of appreciation. In the end all the speakers and attendees came together for a group photograph (to be added later).
As the evening came to an end, we left for our homes with the satisfaction of giving back to the community which has guided us so far, and the hope of staying in touch via similar community events.
