My experience of the conference: Open Source India 2015

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Hello,

I wanted to share my experience of a conference which I was recently a part of : Open Source India (aka OSI Days) - and as the name suggests, this is a conference where the open source enthusiasts come together, and discuss ideas and knowledge with each other. Check out their website (www.osidays.com) to know much more.

I was wearing three hats at the conference - of an attendee, a speaker, and a proctor for some HOLs. And what a power-packed two days it were!

My talk was on IoT – the topic was ‘Build your IoT solutions powered by Python and cloud’, and the abstract can be found here. I took the Sparkfun weather shield and captured the temperature, humidity and the light level in the room. I accessed this data on the serial monitor of the Arduino Uno, and sent this to Raspberry Pi 2. Once this data was captured, I showed how it was possible to push the data to Azure (Events Hub) from Raspberry Pi 2 (running Raspbian) using Python. Once this data was captured, we then saw how to use Stream Analytics to start analyzing the data coming in real-time from Events Hub. All in all – a quick demo of how you can get started with building IoT solutions. I hope the attendees found it useful. The session was probably recorded and I will update the blog with the link once the video is up. Also, feel free to join this group to discuss more on IoT.

Most of my time was spent at the Microsoft booth. Here, we had some hands-on-labs for the attendees on Open Source technologies running on Azure, including Linux VMs on Azure, PHP web apps, Machine Learning, Stream Analytics, etc on Azure. There was not a single time when there wasn’t a queue waiting to get inside the lab room – throughout the two days! This meant that I and my team had two good field days :). We saw people getting excited on running Machine Learning on Azure, SSH into a Linux VM hosted on Azure, create a Logic App connecting SaaS services, or even hosting a website. They saw hands-on how cloud can help them in their journey, and we hope this helped them realize the value of cloud.

As an attendee, I got to attend some portion of a few sessions, and was impressed by the content being presented. All in all, we had a good two days interacting with open source enthusiasts.

Until next time,
Saurabh Kirtani

Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @saurabhkirtani to discuss anything about this blog.