OSI Days 2012

Software, , , , , , Subharanjan

As a software developer, I sometimes attend sessions, seminars, training on specific technology related to my work, to increase my knowledge. This time it was a conference I attended in Bengaluru. OSI Days – 2012, the premier open source conference in Asia, targeted at nurturing and promoting the the open source ecosystem. This was scheduled to be held from 12th-14th October, 2012 at Nimhans convention center, Bengaluru. This opportunity was provided by Mindfire.

Back in September, I got a mail regarding my name being included in the list of attendees from Mindfire who will be attending the conference. I was very much excited and started looking for the day when I along with other six colleagues will be attending the OSI Days.

Day before 12th Oct:
Completed the work, sent the status and left office early to fly from Bhubaneswar to Bengaluru.

Day 1:
As this was the first day of the conference we reached the conference location little earlier. After a short registration process there at the venue we stepped into the Audi 1 where the keynote session was to be given. The conference started with a welcome note followed by the session on usage of Open Source and Commodity Computing in Government projects. Mr. P. Varma, Chief Architect and Technology Adviser to Unique Identification Authority of India(UIDAI – Aadhaar) gave a nice presentation on Commodity Computing and Opensource technologies those are used in one of the large government project in India. It was really interesting to know that the whole project is built upon open-source technologies, open standards and the relational database being used is MySQL. Technology like MongoDB, Hadoop Stack, Hive, Apache Tomcat etc. are used for this big project which handles around 200 trillion biometrics matches per day and 2 Peta Bytes of raw data are being stored. Got to know about different APIs it is providing to banks, financial institutions like eKYC API, Biometric Device API, Biometric SDK API etc. After this, we had a coffee break.

After the break, the presentations started to flow in,one by one. The whole day was for Cloud Computing. Speakers from Sify Technolgies, HP, Torry Harries were there to speak about the Cloud. Got overall idea on Public, Private and Hybrid cloud. Mr Lux Rao gave a very good presentation on this. Atul Kumar Jha, speaker from CSS Corp. talked about OpenStack. Openstack is an open source cloud computing platform for creating public and private clouds. Got to know that any organization can create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.

First day at the conference was awesome. Food was OK. All the sessions were mostly on Cloud Computing, but sometimes I felt that some speakers were doing a kind of marketing of the cloud solutions they provide. Anyway I have now some idea about what exactly a Cloud is.

Day 2:
Day 2 started as usual at the right time. This was a important day as the day was for Web development related topics, on which I work at Mindfire Solutions. Out of the sessions “Off-line Web Applications Using HTML5 Local Storage” was an informative one. HTML5 local storage is a way for web pages to store data inform of key-value pairs locally, within the client web browser. This data persists even after you navigate away from the web site, close your browser tab, exit your browser. Unlike cookies, this data is never transmitted to the remote web server (unless you go out of your way to send it manually). The speaker Mr. Janardan Revuru, Project Manager, HP, Bengaluru demonstrated this with some simple examples. Session on “Test Driven Development And Automation” by Mahesh Salaria from Kayako.com was another good sessions. He gave an overall idea on TDD by providing some lights on the tools that are being used for the TDD and automation like PHPUnit, Selenium, Code Sniffer, xDebug, NetBeans, PHPStrom etc.. Jacob Singh, Director, Acquia India gave a talk on “Drupal Revolution and the Enterprise projects”. Role of Acquia in training people to take-up Drupal to next level and how Drupal is being used in enterprise projects were discussed by him. Also got to know about “Typescript”, “REST Applications With The Slim Micro-Framework”.

Day 3:
The Database Day: Speakers from Oracle talked about MySql new developments and new features. This was really informative. MySQL Cluster, MySQL Performance Schema techniques etc were discussed. Speaker from Cloudera solution gave a presentation on HBase. Hadoop Ecosystem was also discussed by Vaitheeshwar Ramachandran from TCS. I gained some knowledge on bigdata trends on which I was completely unknown.

This was the last day of the conference. I with my colleagues also talked to the representatives from companies like Oracle, PostGreSQL Enterprise DB, Microsoft India who were having stalls at the conference. Overall the conference was informative. Attending the OSI conference was very valuable for me as I got to know about many Open Source technologies that are being used or the future of Open Source.

Thank you Mindfire for giving me this opportunity to attend OSI 2012.

Spread the love
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

My Journey to Certification(a success story)

Thoughts

Every success carries a history behind it. No success is an accident. It always needs a regular disciplined effort and of course a good supporting environment. My Journey to certification goes as below.

Just like any other developer I was also very much afraid of exam pattern, questions and everything that is related to the certification exam. I have also skipped a couple of exam dates in this process. But yes at sometime and somewhere I was accumulating the confidence within myself to go for certification. Mindfire’s work culture has always helped me to tighten my grip on ColdFusion. In fact it allowed me to have knowledge in most of the areas of this technology. The wise decision by Sumit (my that time team lead) to get exam buster to test and get accustomed with the exam was very helpful. I was been continuously inspired by my team members to prepare the best for the exam. In the mean time Rabi (my current team lead) arranged one account in uCertify.com site to prepare more rigorously for the certification. This helped me increasing my confidence to go for certification. This is true that only practical experience in any technology does not help in total to get certified. You have also to go for study of help documents. As because when we work , it covers only some part of the entire technology. So to know and expertise  yourself, you have to go for study of entire documentation of the technology.

Because of the busy project schedules it was not easy to go for study in working hours. So after returning from office around 10 to 11 ‘o’ clock in the night, I was getting little refreshment and was sitting for studying till night 3 ‘o’ clock. In the previous night of my certification exam, almost everyone of my teammates wished me best of luck for the exam, especially Chandra, Smaranika, Preety and Rabi. They all inspired me to give my best in the exam. and get certified. But finally I may say that, though I tried for normal certification in ColdFusion 9 but it’s my god, who made me certified in Advanced ColdFusion. I scored 81% in the certification test. Which in a single go made me certified as an Adobe Certified Expert in ColdFusion and Adobe Certified Expert in Advanced ColdFusion, which is really a matter of pride for me, for my team and for my Company.

Thanks all for your help and support, without which it could have never been a success.

Spread the love
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

Experience of Web & Database Testing Workshop

Software, Software Quality, Thoughts, , , , ,

Knowledge as we know is not limited. We cannot say we have gained all the knowledge that we had to . Each day is a learning process, each person we meet we learn something from them, each work we do we learn something and the list is endless. And when it comes to our career , we would always want to have the best of our knowledge be it through learning , through training , etc.

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the 2 day workshop on Web and Database testing. Since the trainer was a senior industry veteran, with almost 20 years of experience, everyone was looking forward to attend and learn something new from the training. It was a 2 days training session with 25 QAs attending. There were many interesting topics covered in this session .

Continue reading Experience of Web & Database Testing Workshop →

Spread the love
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

I am in Mindfire Solutions and I am a Winner

Software, Thoughts, , , , , ,

Winning is a special thing. In every aspect of life winning gives a satisfaction, endless happiness and helps  prepare a path by showing a ladder of success to the next level. And of course , winning moments are the best moments in life. It has been more than a year since I am associated with Mindfire Solutions and I feel like a winner. Because being a part of a winning team makes you feel like a winner and Mindfire Solutions is a winner for 2012. It is not just me and my co-workers saying it, leading management consulting firms and industry leaders say it too.

Continue reading I am in Mindfire Solutions and I am a Winner →

Spread the love
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  

Mission Certification: Accomplished

Stories, Thoughts, , ,

Since I have cleared two of the Microsoft’s certifications within a month I have been besieged with questions of my colleagues on how to clear the exam. There is phobia that the certification exams are tough and we must prepare rigorously for them. It’s nothing like that. Now I feel happy to share with you the inside of cracking the certifications.
Somebody said in the past that “Work Smart Not Hard!“.This is the trick since we do not get enough time as professionals.

Continue reading Mission Certification: Accomplished →

Spread the love
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
QA Software Testing

Am I a Good Tester??

Thoughts

QA TestingWhen it comes to the profession, everyone wants to be the BEST in their respective areas. A designer strains his mind and tries to produce the best designs ever. An architect thinks big and tries to build the best architecture in the market. A software developer tries to write the best, optimised and standardized code. Even the person who sells paani poori on the road side tries to be the BEST in the business. From where this mentality of being BEST comes from? Why do we think of being the best in whatever we do? The answer is simple. It adds value to our career, knowledge and organization in which we work which in turn draws more business, business in terms of more customers for the paani poori waala, business in terms of more orders for the designer, business in terms of more assignment for the developer and business in terms of more clients for an organization. And all of us know business is directly proportional to money 🙂 :).

Continue reading Am I a Good Tester?? →

Spread the love
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
Why Do You Do Things You Do?

Few things to consider before testing any application

Software Quality, Thoughts, , , , ,

I have a wall-pWhy Do You Do Things You Do?aper on my desktop which says: – “Why Do You Do The Things You Do” which forced me to write something like this which i feel should be considered before testing any application: –

1. Learning: – Analyze your test results thoroughly. Do not confuse yourself with ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ but finding the root reason of ‘fail’ or ‘pass’ will give you an idea for the solution of the problem. Testers knowledge increases by sending solutions for the problem

2. 100% of anything is not possible so having 100% test coverage is not possible but we can try to touch 99% of perfection.

Continue reading Few things to consider before testing any application →

Spread the love
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •  
  •