Goodbye

This is my last blog post on this blog. The last 4 years have been an amazing journey. From being fresh out of college into Macromedia to the Adobe-Macromedia acquisition, from working on Flex 1.5,2,3 to being a full time evangelist was as good a career I could have dreamed of.

I worked with a great team, right from the Flex QE team to the most awesome India Evangelism. People were always supportive and encouraging and taught me a great lot of things.

The most thanks goes out to my dear friend and evangelist Harish, my mentor Ramesh, the ever supporting Ananth (Director Flex & CF Engineering India), Ben Forta. Special thanks to Lauren for being the best manager I ever had and for encouraging me to follow what I wanted to do.

Cheers to the India Evangelism team, the best team I ever had… You guys are great.

But its time for me to move on and follow my aspirations. Today, I am starting my MBA at Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. If things turn out as I hope it would, I might continue on this blog in 2 years.

I will blog about my MBA experience here –http://raghuformba.wordpress.com/

Invitation for Flash Ahead

Here’s announcing Flash Ahead… The event that will showcase the future of the Flash platform to the Indian audience for the first time.

Date: 17th January, 2009

Venue: Lalit Ashok (erstwhile Grand Ashok), Bangalore

Time: 09:00 to 18:00

At Flash Ahead we are going to announce the selected finalists of riathon’08 and they will battle it out in an on-stage showdown of application, in front of the crowd and judges. Later in the day, the results will be announced and prizes will be distributed. You will also get to see the latest technologies on the Adobe Flash Platform.

Flash Ahead is your opportunity to catch the very first preview in India of latest in the RIA world that was previewed at MAX 2008. Sneak peeks into Gumbo (the next version of Flex), Flash Catalyst (earlier called Thermo), Alchemy (a technology that brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Flash Player), BlazeDS.NET, Flex™ plug-in for Microsoft® Visual Studio®, Actionscript Cloud Services and much more. For more information see this page – http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/flash-ahead

There are limited seats available, so please confirm at the earliest. If you are interested in attending, RSVP at – http://endtoend.in/apps/forms/adobe/flash/adobe.htm

The MSRIT Mojo – Flex Bootcamp [Day 2]

I was said that we are starting by 08:30 and I reached the gates of MSRIT, dot at 08:45 (damn Bangalore traffic). I reached the lab, thinking the few contestants await me there and that they too must have had the same experience with the traffic as me.

But lo! the hall was full and as Meghana told me, it had been since 08:15… wow. I saw several of them had tired faces and were concentrating hard to build one of the 4 applications that we had given them to build:

• An airline booking system
• A photo album viewer
• A video player/organizer
• A quiz

I quizzed some of them and found that they have been up all night going through Devent and the Flex in a Week videos. I admire their commitment and applaud their efforts.

Till 15:00, they were onto building the applications with a little bit of help from us. Special thanks to our community member Mr. Vipin from Impelsys Software, who accompanied us to help these budding programmers.

Jyoti (Head, R&D, AztechSoft) speaking in the closing ceremony

At 3 the mayhem started. We had the whole 200 split into 3 labs and we had to do an evaluation of over 100 applications and select about 20 of them for final evaluation. We had the Evangelism team, Ananth and Ms. Jyoti (Head, R&D , AztechSoft) doing the final evaluation.

Aditya & Nutan from CMRIT, Bangalore came out as winners. Congrats guys! We had a great closing ceremony, with a whole lt of interaction. Thanks to the whole MSRIT team including Kavya, Bhavana, Meghana, Priyanka, Prateek and others for making this a grand success…

Its done… It was fun but tiring

Winners – Aditya & Nuthan from CMRIT, Bangalore

CMRIT, the Champions

The volunteers – Thanks guys, you were awesome

At PizzaHut

We all headed out to dinner at PizzaHut before we called it a day…

I have a feeling that I am gonna see a lot more from MSRIT and that I will be visiting often 🙂

The MSRIT Mojo – Flex Bootcamp [Day 1]

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 🙂

Free passes for Academia for mx:devsummit

I have some free passes with me for mx:devsummit that i have set aside for academia (students and faculty). Here’s how you can get them:

• If you are a student, go ahead and register here on my site [http://raghunathrao.com/announcements/events/StudentRegistrations.html] if you are a student
• If you are part of the faculty, please drop me a mail [raghunath.rao@gmail.com] so that i can personally call and invite you.

Hurry… passes on a first-come-first-serve basis. More info about the event here [http://www.endtoend.in/ete2008/adobe/ria/micro/]

Do you want to do a Flex/AIR Demo in mx:devsummit ?

Calling for Flex/AIR Demos at the <mx:devsummit/>. If you have a cool Flex/AIR Demo to show to the world, here’s your chance. This is open for companies and individuals.

Here’s a brief of the demos:

• You get 4 mins on stage
• No PPT, dive right to the demo and talk about the application
• We have a total of 45 mins, so we can realistically have 7-8 demos.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Sign in for the event at the event website[http://www.endtoend.in/ete2008/adobe/ria/micro/registration.php]
• Sign up for the demos at this app on my website [http://raghunathrao.com/announcements/events/DemoRegistrations.html]

I will contact you and then we can take this forward.

WikiDot Flex Geeks – your community window to get discounts for mx:devsummit

Thanks to Priyank Kapadia of the Pune Flex User Group for the timely creation of WikiDot Flex Geeks.

In reply to my last post, Priyank went ahead and created a wiki which can help you form community-driven groups from your city, so that you can avail group discounts for the event.

Go to the wiki (it has edit permissions for all) and put your name down in the table corresponding to your city. If your city is not listed, go ahead and add it.

Do you want to provide Flex Training?

Are you a corporate trainer looking to provide Flex training? Do you know people who are looking to be a part of the Flex training bandwagon?

Let me know. We at Adobe India are doing an “Adobe Flex Enablement Workshop” for Corporate trainers looking to add Flex as a part of their training profile.

This is a FREE event and if you are interested to be a part of it, mail me [rrao at adobe dot com]

This is scheduled for last week of August.. so hurry!

To the Flex Community: If you know any trainers who you think are interested in providing Flex training, ask them to contact me or send their details to me so that i can invite them

I am speaking at BEA Dev2Dev Tech Days

I will be speaking at the BEA Dev2Dev Techdays on May 8th in Pune & May 9th in Mumbai. I will be showing how to build RIAs with Flex upon the BEA WebLogic platform. Checkout the details of the event here… The venues in the two places are:

Pune (8th May):

Time:	9:00 am – 1:30 pm
Venue:	Hotel Aurora Towers
	Moledina Road, Camp
	Pune – 411001

Mumbai (9th May):

Time:	9:00 am – 1:30 pm
Venue:	The Leela
	Nr. Sahar International Airport
	Marol, Andheri (East)
	Mumbai – 400059

I am also gonna be a part of the Pune Flex User Group meeting at Symbiosis Pune on the 7th evening. You can contact Anand Vardhan for more details… I’ll put up some as soon as I have them too 🙂

See ya all at the BEA Dev2Dev Conference or at the Pune FUG…

Vacation Over… Back in the Flex World

I’M BACK….

Just came back from a long vacation. Was in Delhi for about a month and then took a 10 day vacation to the Himalayas (to Leh Ladakh). The Trip was really amazing.

Now back to reality and back in the Flex World !!