My plane touched down in Bangalore at around 4:30 in the morning. I made my way out of the terminal to a driver waiting to drive me to the conference hotel where I’d be staying for the first leg of the conference. An hour’s drive later, I walked into my hotel room. The conference started in 3 hours. I tried my best to get some sleep but a combination of time-zone induced circadian confusion and anxiety at the thought of oversleeping kept me mostly awake. At 8 o’clock the first of my three alarms went off. Moments before the third one rang, the front desk called with my wake-up call. I flew halfway around the world, I wasn’t going to miss this.
I showered, got dressed and made my way to the lobby to get my badge. People were already gathered and registering. The atmosphere was professional and inviting. Things got underway at 9 o’clock with a keynote from CollabNet‘s Venkat Janardhanam. We then split into two tracks. The first of my talks was at noon. I was following Joydip Kanjilal who was giving back to back talks on Node.js and new features in .NET. Did you know Node was single-threaded? I didn’t. Also, I’m not a .NET developer but memory fragmentation cleanup is actually pretty cool.
Noon rolled around and it was my turn to deliver the first of my two talks. It went really well with lots of Q&A during and after the session. I felt I connected with the crowd and that they got something out of it. My jQuery workshop was equally successful though unfortunately less of a workshop and more of a talk. I had too much content for the allotted 50 minutes so I had to fly through it pretty quickly, not giving the delegates much time to try out the examples. I determined to remedy that for the Pune leg of the trip where I’d be repeating both sessions. My talks delivered, I was free to attend the rest of the conference, learn and mingle with the delegates. It was also an opportunity to answer questions that attendees had regarding the topics I’d covered. I have to admit, the post-talk discussions were my favourite part of the conference.
I was soon leaving Bangalore and flying to Pune for a repeat performance to a new crowd at a new venue. This time, my JavaScript talk was immediately after the keynote. My jQuery workshop wasn’t till the end of the day though, giving me time to tweak things. I put together an HTML page that allowed delegates to follow along with the examples and copy and paste them into the console to quickly see the results of what was being taught. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stick around to answer questions this time as a car was waiting to drive me to Mumbai for my flight out of India.
All in all, I feel the trip was a success. I was able to teach, learn and meet some great people. Many thanks to the organizers at UBM India for inviting me and I look forward to doing it again next year.
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