Great Indian Developer Summit 2010: A Review

By : lakshman

Great Indian Developer Summit, is the India's largest developer conference, held at Bangalore, India; in its third edition this year. The conference concluded last Friday. The summit had about a 1000 visitors on the first day and a comparable number on the other days. The conference basically caters to the enterprises, and hence their focus on the .Net, Java and Flash. There were many star speakers. I gave a talk on django, introducing it and then explaining the standard community conventions to make good reusable applications. Django, being a social software, developed by a community, it is important to cover the community aspect, and the innumerable number of reusable application that exist. So, there is enough of that.

The slides themselves were created using Beamer class, in latex. The code is on Github, and there are some custom commands. How the beamer class that was created specifically to create bullet point presentations can so totally create web2.0 kind of slides with images and text on them, by just a simple command, and continues to be not only relevant, but also best in class presentation creator, gives me a kick. I always hated PowerPoint and could have in no way done so many slides using it, that way. "Write the relevant text and give the path of the image to include", or "give the path of the file that has code in it, to include in this slide" is the way I think and slide maker should create slides from. So glad beamer and latex could do that. It should be relatively easy to write a markdown to ppt compiler, given the presentation format. Until next time. I am no expert in .Net and given an option to, would avoid working with Java. Nevertheless, the sessions by Venkat Subramaniam were interesting. It was a good experience to meet many great developers and people. Matthew_McCullough is an expert in large number of things. Session by Scott Davis was definitely awesome. It was overall a great experience.