I’ve always felt that as a student, one is much more adventurous, willing to try new things and not bound by any predispositions. The free-spirit. Hence I was very excited when we decided to run a Flex Bootcamp exclusively for students at MSRIT (M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology) on the 7th & 8th of November.
End of last month we visited the college and was worried if we could get the people that we wanted. But Meghana & Bhavana, 2 students from the final year said they would pull out all stops to the extent that it might be difficult to stem the flow. Though we didn’t believe them completely, we went ahead and opened the registrations.
Bhavana & Meghana
The response was amazing. I opened the event website with 400 seats being available, but in the weekend, got a panic call from Bhavana asking me to increase it to 600. The next day morn, that maxed out too… We were really curious to see how many turn up. Usually when any free event is done (tech or otherwise), people safely expect a 20-30% dropout rate. I was frankly expecting about 400 people to turn up.
Then the day arrived and mayhem!!! Not only did most of the 600 turn up, we had a lot of spot registrations and the total tally extended well up to 700. We had hire an extra hall and set up video-conferencing to accommodate all. Still some people went back disappointed.
The Crowd (in one room)
The session started with Ananth talking about Web2.0 & RIAs and Nisa demoing some applications like the FlexStore. During this time a problem arose that was probably the only iota of disappointment in the whole event. The video-conferencing didn’t work. The audio was so poor that people started getting frustrated. That’s when me & Harish decided to cut it and run a parallel session in the other room. That session was the most enjoyable session that we have done together, except perhaps the time when we demoed our application during Kevin’s keynote in our internal summit.
Anant on Web2.0
Nisa demoing Flex Store
The rest of the day had Anirudh, Sujit & Anand talking in one room while I and Harish juggled the sessions in the other. My throat was hoarse by the end, but I was feeling better than I had felt in a long time. Infectious mojo I tell you 
Anirudh’s session on ActionScript
Then, we had a preliminary test to shortlist 200 people for a contest to build a RIA the next day. Once the test was over, during the evaluation phase, Harish and Me entertained the crowd giving away goodies for Flex basics & Adobe trivia questions.
The Test
650 people crammed into a 400 capacity hall
We then had a 2 hour lab for the selected 200 and thus ended day 1
November 22, 2008 at 11:27 am |
fantastic team that came down to MSRIT , we were overwhelmed to see the response too
but the feedback that all students who came over to the event gave us has been totally great ! in the end after the test,many students came back demanding why they were not selected since they did not want to miss the hands-on lab session ! What a day it was ! 
PS:We r stil sorry about the Video conf that flopped
it was the first time it happened to us too but the fact that Harish(aka SPRING) and you decided to solve the problem rather than crib bout it ! Great work guys !
December 6, 2008 at 11:56 am |
hi dude…..ive come to kanow abt this thing of flex..an very much amateur(not even that illereate….)how do u expect me start of this flex thing??
ur views n help will ber highly appreciated…
anxiously waiting…..
December 14, 2008 at 7:19 pm |
[...] What follwed was absolute mayhem on the day of the event .To read about what actually happened at the event,Visit Bhavana’s blog and Raghu’s blog [...]