WARNING: this is a long post. I had plenty of time to write it while I was on my way back to Alexandria . enjoy.
It was a nice day. the sessions were great and meeting people like Mohammed Hossam, Amr Sobhy, Mohamed Tanna and Mohamed Meligy is more than great. I didn’t have the chance of attending Mohammed Hossam’s SOA session from the beginning (read the previous post). Amr was there from the beginning and he said that it was very good and that he liked how M.Hossam presented it.
the 2nd session I attended was about SilverLight . it was a beginners introduction of what you can do using this new technology . it left me hungry for more information …
the 3rd one was about SEO by M.Meligy. the contents were great like expected . mostly, I get bored so fast , but how Meligy moves and talks on the stage succeeded to keep my eyes opened till the end of the session.
the 4th one was “CLR by XAML” by Hossam Zain. It was great and added more to what we saw in the SilverLight session. Amr didn’t attend this session, he went to the “LINQ for XML” one by Mai Soliman. we wondered if this was her first public talk (I know this feeling).
the 5th was “IronPython and C# 3.0, a dialog” by Mohamad Tayseer and Mohammed Hossam. it was one of the best sessions I attended in this day.
the 6th was the open mic session. all of the attendees were allowed to talk. SK guys managed the talk to the way of why some people use .net while others use Java and others like me use php for web development. then it went to be about why most of software and websites innovations were born in the open source community, taking sample like how FaceBook uses php (why they chose it?). then Dudy tried to change the direction of the conversation to be about which is the most important from your perspective? innovation, idea, technology or what ?
the first guy to talk from the attendees started by defending .net against Java and talking about how every thing he wants is already in .net, while he believes that some other people will like to use Java to save some money and he didn’t see this as a bad thing.
some other guy took the mic and started to talk about that we shouldn’t be depending on one platform as we don’t know what the companies will like to use more in the future, so we have to be ready for a day like that.
then Mohammed Hossam started to narrow the scope of the conversation to make the talk about web development specially. why there is php, python, .net and java? why some people choose one over another. some ex-php developers who moved to .net started to talk about how rich and powerful is the .net platform than php.
at this time I got the courage to talk. I went to the stage and took the mic and looked at the attendees, and Bang!!, I forgot the points I was going to talk about and what the previous guy said. I had to make up something to talk about in less than 3 seconds so I can look less stupid. I quoted something that I don’t really remember who said it, maybe Wez Furlong. I said “in php, the community creates what’s needed, we innovate by our selves. the .net guys, will wait till Microsoft innovates”.
I went back to my seat and tried to remember what I was going really to talk about and didn’t give very good attention to what the others said after that.
at the end of the session, I remembered the stupid points again but there were no time. anyway, the points were:
- ask the attendees: how many web developers here?
# main point: the difference between how most of the ASP.net and PHP developers think.
- ask the attendees: who uses JS tools like YUI, JQuery, Prototype?
- ask the attendees: who uses or cares about
– web usability?
– web pages accessibility? (who knows what’s the accessibility here and who cares about that?)
– web standards?
- who knows what’s microformats?
# main point : why open source community innovates while .net isn’t?
- the open source community cares about more low level details.
- we know the ins and outs of our tools
- we created it
- we know why it was created
- we share ideas
I learned that a pin and paper should be always my friends, specially in situations like that. so learn from my fault and write what you are going to talk about on some paper before asking for the mic. I saw other people in the session who forgot every thing after taking the mic.
the next session is “In-depth JavaScript” by M.Meligy. he talked about JavaScript and Managed JavaScript. I title it as one of the best too.
I rate all the day: Very Good. I will be willing to attend the next Demo Day -en sha2 Allah- :-)
Hi, I'm 