Sun Tech Days At HICC

I attended Sun Tech Days (Feb 27 to 29), an International event to spread the knowledge of Java and Sun Solaris. This was held at HICC (Hyderadbad International Convention Centre), a marvelous place. Well, around 4,000 people attended the event and some more were listening from Bangalore and Chennai. 

Having more number of people attending an event of this kind is good and bad as well. Good, because a lot of people get to know about the developments related to Java. But not good, as not all of them are really interested in technical aspects of the event. Some of them were there because company sponsored their entry and they were there to enjoy with friends. But it is very important to realize the real joy comes from the fact that you are learning. Just talking to friends, drinking coffee and eating buffet lunch will never be enough. It is very irritating to see that some of attendees keep talking to each other even while an important session (such as Keynote by Rich Green, Sun Executive Vice President for Software) is taking place.

Coming to the technical aspects, it is good and it is refreshing to know about new things and that too from people who are from Sun MicroSystems. Most of them are part of the development teams of some of the open source projects like NetBeans, Open Office, Open Solaris, MySQL (which was recently taken by Sun for $1Billion).

I was impressed by the session of Mr. Chuk and Roman Strobl. The major talking point has been web 2.0 and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and how major developments are taking place in these areas. As Sun has been an advocate of open source, there is a lot of talk about open source.

Overall it was a mega event that would certainly benefit people who have interest in it. There were some challenging questions asked by people who have problem related to their real-world application development. Sometimes the speakers had no immediate answer to some of the questions. Well technology is going at a pace where it is not easy for any one to know everything.

On the entertainment part, there was live concert of Euphoria on the first day and Fashion show on the second day. A few gifts were given away. Unfortunately too many takers for such gifts and pushing and pulling is natural (dignity is hitting rock bottom).

For those who are interested in taking Sun Certification Exams, there were exam vouchers sold by NIIT for Rs. 4000/-, with validity date up to 31-Jan-2009.