Sun TechDay at VIT University

Sun Microsystems recently came to our college to conduct a TechDay (also called: "SunDay", which co-incidentally was held in our college on a sunday too!) on March 1st, 2009. The event comprised of four workshops - on J2ME, Solaris, and JavaFX. We had to conduct two parallel sessions of J2ME instead of one (so J2ME counts for 2) because the response was so great -- we got double the no. of registrations we had expected! The expected nos. for each session was 70 which works out to 210 in total for the three sessions, but we registered 162 for J2ME, 85 for Solaris and 124 for JavaFX = 371 registrations!

The engineers who conducted the sessions were excellent, the sessions were really informative, and we're already receiving requests for another TechDay from those folks who missed out on the registrations as well as those who attended (for sessions on advanced topics). We're planning another version of this somewhere at the start of the next semester.

The task of organizing the entire show fell upon the Sun Open Source Community that me and Aditya had kicked off in December last year, and the team of 9 core members and 23 associates that was selected did an exceptional job! Frankly I gave a pretty conservative estimate to the Sun folks when asked initially about the participation, keeping in mind the previous events, and other issues like 1st being a sunday and the SEDS India National Conference happening at the same time. But the members of the Sun Core and the Sun Associates did a fabulous job in getting so many registrations, ensuring that all the ground-operations on 1st went smoothly and basically that everyone had a good time. Kudos to them!

Cheers