I attended the SiliconIndia India Software Developer Conference event over the weekend (March 24th, 25th, 2012). It has been a great experience with experienced executives from reputed organizations like Bell Labs India, eBay, Intuit, IBM, Dell etc. The most common themes around which the topics revolved are mobility, cloud computing, usability and data analytics.
The keynote sessions touched on the broader trends that are relevant for the software engineers. Vijay Anand from Intuit opened the conference with food for thought on why and how the developers should have customer interactions and how design plays a key role in the overall success. "Design to Delight" is the Mantra Vijay shared. He has also shared the Intuit philosophy of metrics which are not the typical software centric metrics like defects, mean time for resolution etc but the 3 key metrics they use are
1. How quick the feature gets to the customer
2. Are customers using it
3. Are customers/users recommending it to others
Vishy, head of Bell Labs India (A-LU) delivered very interesting talk on Big Data. He presented a historic evolution as well as contemporary landscape of various data management technologies. The key takeaways for me are the new techniques like in-memory processing and the vast amount of new tools that are available today like Redis, CouchDB, MongoDB, Neo4j etc. These are the tools and products that are making the today's social networks with humongous data a reality.
Rajesh Rajendran from eBay has shared the characteristics of a great platform. This session followed by the break-out sessions on 3 different tracks, Development, Architecture & Design and Enterprise at Scale. I have attended most of the sessions happening in the Scalable applications for Enterprises track as most of my application in this category. I did sneak into few topics of interest in other tracks as well.
On Day 2, Shankar Kalyana, DE&CTO, IBM India has spoken about the future of software development. Shankar has made it very interesting and did the talk without a powerpoint presentation (a welcome change :-)). He talked about the rapid pace at which the technology transitions are happening and the need for professional to embrace and adopt to the changes. I had an interesting after talk conversation with Shankar on the IBM Smart planet solution as well as innovation in general.
A common thread the different talks, sessions and speakers is the consensus on the latest happenings. It's certainly cloud computing, mobility and intelligent data processing (data analytics, business intelligence, BigData technologies etc..). Each of these are at different stages of the hype cycle but they are already changing the industry significantly.
I will share the detailed information on the sessions happened in the individual tracks in an upcoming post. Please do come back and check it out in couple of days.
