Shreef

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I knew about this event 2 days ago by coincidence. A group of programmers and software and knowledge freedom advocates are organizing an event in Alexandria University’s Faculty of Engineering to educate people about some targeted topics from the 1st to 15th of September 2009.

from their sessions schedule. I can see that they concentrate on topics related to
- programming under Linux
- Open Solaris
- Security
- Wikipedia

I had an interest in attending this event as I didn’t attend any offline event for a long time, maybe that last one I attended was .NetWork‘s 7th gathering. the fact that I’m a night programmer, makes trying to wake up early seem impossible. I go to bed every day at 7:00 am and I can’t succeed to sleep before that time. but today I did it somehow and slept for 2 hours then went to the event.

The first session was a beginners level session about Linux Ubuntu and the presenter did well at introducing the audience to what is Linux, but the only thing I hated, is that way he described windows as evil or bad operating system compared to the great Linux system. he wasn’t fair enough, but this is how most of the my operating system rocks people do (whatever if they are using Mac, Windows or Linux). in total, the session was good but I was seeking for a more advanced session, maybe I didn’t have to attend that session .

The second session was about Wikipedia. a number of the Arabic Wikipedia contributors were there trying to get some of the audience into writing for Wikipedia or even contributing suggestions. between the sessions they held a workshop to educate the interested audience on how to add/edit pages on Wikipedia.

I noticed something interesting. The Wikipedia presenter in the second session had a notebook with Windows 7 installed. I thought that he will be using Linux but it seems like those Wikipedia guys/gals don’t belong to the same geeky class as the other organizers of the event, but they share the same vision and target.

the day is rated good and I wish to attend the next sessions till the end of the event. if you are in or near Alexandria or passing by and interested,  join the sessions at lectures hall M3 in the preparatory building in faculty of Engineering Alexandria.

the next  2 sessions will be on 7-9-2009, these will be about security. check the the full events schedule and the Facebook event page .

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- :-)

There is no available seats in tomorrow’s Cairo 6:10 am train. I ‘ll have to travel in the 7:00 am train -en sha2 Allah-, which expected to arrive to Cairo at 10:00 am (when the first session starts).

if you love me, get yourself the first seat and reserve me the seat next to you :-).