Mohammad Tayseer

The Idea

The idea of the 2nd demo day started after MIX 07. We were very excited about the new technologies: Silverlight, Jasper & DLR. We got more excited after we used these technologies in our own products. We chose topics 7 weeks before the demo day. At that time we already started using Jasper in one of our projects & was thinking about porting another one to the DLR, which was using IronPython 1.1.

I'm using Python since 2004 & I have presented it to a lot of my friends. I have presented it also at an internal demo day, which yielded this post. This was a good chance to present Python to the egyptian developers community. Dody suggested that it should be a comparison between static & dynamic languages. I was very worried about this, because it's hard to control it.

Preparation

We started preparing for demo day 2 one week before the end of May. Everybody had his topics. Taher, Ayman & Dody started looking for the suitable place. The rest of us worked on reading everything we can find about the new technologies, using them (in Silverkey applications, if possible), making the presentations ready, etc. Some changes happened to the topics & materials. Some people declined, for several reasons. We have been rehearsing the sessions daily for 2 weeks before the demo day.

The Day

I arrived at the place at 8:10 AM. I was wearing a 3-peaces suite (& it was about 40-something °C). People were telling a lot of jokes about me, including Dody calling me the "Mafia Guy" [:)].

We started checking for everything in the place: the microphones, the projectors, the demos, the business card, etc. We were worried: Only Hossam Zain, Mohammad Hossam & Mohammad Meligy gave presentation in the previous demo day. For the rest of us, this was the first time to present to a large audience. The size of the croud is large this time: almost 400 people.

The action started at 10:00 PM with the keynote, where Taher - our CEO - introduced Silverkey & why we are making a second demo day.

The first technical session was about WCF, by Mohammad Hossam. People liked the session & how he presented it.

After that, we had 2 parallel tracks. The problem with this is that you cannot attend all the sessions you like. So I'm describing only the sessions I attended. We are going to upload the video sessions very soon.

I attended the Jasper, by Ahmad Ali. Jasper is an ORM based on Microsoft Entity Framework for dynamic languages. I liked this session & Ahmad style was really good.

The next session was about WF, by Mohammad Nour. He presented it well, but he was frustrated a little bit at the end because he felt that people didn't get it, but the questions at the end showed that some people were really interested.

The next session was LINQ to XML, by Mai Soliman. She presented the material very well & she answered a lot of questions.

The next session was by me & Mohammad Hossam about comparing IronPython with C# 3. I was worried as hell about this one. AFAIK, this is the first time somebody talks about Python in Egypt. What scared me more is that it was a dialog, not a one-sided presentation. I thought that this would be the best or the worst session in demo day. The audience were interested & some of them were already using Python, so this will be a good start for a Python community here in Egypt.

We had an open-mic session after that. The people took the mic & started discussing their ideas. We started by asking this question "What do you think will be the next big thing?". As usual, it turned into the boring java-vs-.net discussion, sometimes mentioning PHP. We heard the usual argument: Java is more suitable than .net for enterprise applications. We tried to move it to another subject, but to no avail.

Finally, I attended the Blackbelt Javascript by Mohammad Meligy. Though Meligy can always keep the audience interested, he always takes more time that he should :).

A final note: we are not Microsoft. We are not a Microsoft partner or a training company. We made this only because we love it. It's a chance for all of us to share what we know. Being the presenter doesn't mean that I'm the smartest guy. By the way, we are not the only company which shares knowledge with the community. It's just that we have the biggest event.

We really appreciate everyone who came, specially people who came from places far-aways as Alexandria. It was a great chance to meet all of these people. We are waiting for your suggestion