Good afternoon ladies and gents. Today was the Developer Day at Arabnet, it was nice yet not as how I personally expected it to be on the level of: Event organization(time management, and place) , and also on the level of the content and the presenters.
First of all it was in Habtoor Hotel there are basically 2 main rooms in which presentations were going on and some presentations were running concurrently.
Here is how the schedule looks like.
As a schedule it is good and it is cool that you can shift from one track to another at any time. But the 2 rooms are considered small with respect to the volume of those who are attending also the whole area outside the rooms where people are supposed to sit, have coffee and have the lunch is extremely small(relative to how many people there are) so I couldn't stay standing for like one hour in the middle of a crowd with my 17-inch laptop hanging on my shoulders waiting for the next session. Plus I took my dev laptop for a reason which is to use it but unfortunately the space in one of the rooms isn't comfortable enough for a 17" laptop to have on the table and the other room doesn't even have any tables, I was expecting to participate in the little competition but since the space isn't comfortable enough I left. Tomorrow and on I will be taking only my netbook with me.
Now on the level of the presentations , some were really nice and some weren't as I expected them to be, some had excellent presenters talking while one or two were horrible.
Panel 1: Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, InMobi
This one was excellent, there was a very nice discussion about how and where the mobile(especially smartphone) market is going in the region it also discussed the potential and trends in the arab mobile market. Regional representers from Google, Microsoft, and Nokia where there to answer questions and talk about their latest strategies and plans for the Arab mobile market.
ST: Ruby on Rails - eSpace
This presentation I had much bigger expectations for it. The guy who presented looks like a really deep Ruby guru but he really lacks good presentation skills. He talked a bit about Ruby what it is and showed examples and then hopped to Rails and started going into some details and at some point it was quite confusing. Although this session is targeted at those who have no idea about Ruby or Rails. In addition, he was going really fast which made him lose some audience and he finished everything in around 10 to 15 minutes although the session is supposed to be 25(even 25 is not enough IMO)
Google Talk
This one was awesome, the presenter was excellent at presenting the material, he didn't lose the audience focus and he finished exactly on time. The talk was about HTML5 and it's new features he also showed some demos and explained the code snippets. It was very clear and cool. Some of the topics discussed were: HTML5 Voice Recognition, Canvas 2D, Canvas 3d + WebGL (pretty amazing) , Drag n Drop, Gelocation API and overview of games with HTML5. What I would also have liked to hear was some more info about HTML5 Websockets. This session was going in parallel with the MS Silverlight one and I am sure that when we have HTML5 support on all browsers it can kick it's ass easily.
YUI3: Yahoo
This session was good too, the presenter talked well, was clear and delivered the content as expected. YUI is nice but I didn't see what really differentiates the YUI JS framework over JQuery. Someone asked him this and he gave an answer that wasn't much relevant. But it was a cool presentation all in all.
UxTalk: Mashhoor Al Dubayan
This presentation was quite cool and nice to see. The presenter was also good and clear also he gave some good tips for giving users a good user experience and how a good user experience of an app can add to it's value and make it stand. He also suggested two books to read for having some knowledge about web usability, how users think and how to enhance their experience. One of them is Don't Make Me Think which I have already read, the other I forgot it's name.
Game Development: Wixel Studios
I expected more out of this presentation. It started with a presentation about the latest flash game of Wixel Studios which was done for Almaza, some time was wasted on talking about the details of playing the game and the controls(the forward key lets you go forward... bla bla bla) all was said orally and later he showed the game he was talking about, it is nice and I liked the idea. He then talked about topics in web based games including performance and how it can be enhanced, he also showed some code snippets about the basic parts of the code in the gaming including the "game loop", nothing was really special in that technical talk because it can all be read online. Also there was a small discussion about online gaming in the arab world in general.
And they went for lunch but found that it was too crowded and that I will have to stand for more than one hour to wait for the other sessions to start, and I started to have a small headache so I decided to leave. What I was planning to attend and missed today:
- Lightning Talks ( No idea what that would be)
- Competition: OneHH ( figured out that it wont be possible relative to how much crowded the room would be and the size of my giant laptop and no table to put it on)
- Sprint
All in all it was a nice experience, I will be also attending tomorrow, Thursday and Friday too and I will be writing reviews about the sessions I will be attending. I met Samer there and we talked a bit plus we attended some of the sessions together. He will give his feedback about the event too I guess.
And here is the only picture I took in one of the rooms while waiting for one of the sessions to start:
As a final note I think an hotel is not suited for such big events especially when only relatively small rooms are allocated. I think tomorrow it is going to be different.