https://magesh.ioGatsbyJSMon, 22 Dec 2025 14:01:56 GMThttps://magesh.io/wordle-cli-game-using-javascript/https://magesh.io/wordle-cli-game-using-javascript/Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT A few years ago, a simple game called Wordle gained immense popularity worldwide. Everyone was playing and sharing stats on Twitter / X with so much excitement. Later, The New York Times acquired it for a few million dollars. I thought, millions for such a simple game? Wow! But it is a fantastic game. My wife and I played it every evening after work. But we could only play one game and then had to wait 24 hours for the next one. So I decided to build the game myself so we could play it as many times as we wanted. I wanted to build a console-based game, so I didn't have to worry much about the UI. I did create a CLI interface, a good-looking one. A coder like me would always enjoy doing things on the console, and it could be a good learning project to practice my craft, I thought to myself. My wife and I both wanted to try to build our own versions. I wrote it in JavaScript, and she used Python. It was fun. I built the first scrappy version over a weekend. My wife and I started playing unlimited games with the version I built. Isn't that cool? Recently, I took the time to polish it a bit and publish it online for others to play. I published it as an npm package, so anyone can easily install and play it with a single command. If you want to try, open your terminal and type the following command: `npm install -g wordle-cli-js` and then type, `wordle` That will start the game, and you can play if you know the rules. If you are interested in seeing the code, you can take a look at it on GitHub: [https://github.com/imagesh/wordle-cli](https://github.com/imagesh/wordle-cli) Let me know if you find any issues or have any suggestions for improving the code. https://magesh.io/is-ruby-dying/https://magesh.io/is-ruby-dying/Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT I see people asking this question frequently. Is ruby dead? or is it dying? Well, I will answer that with a blog post and not just my opinion, I have some insights to back it up. So here is the short answer: No, ruby is not dead or dying. If anything, it is aging like fine wine. You don't believe me? [Read this blog post](https://medium.com/railsfactory/ruby-is-not-dying-its-aging-like-fine-wine-952880cecb01) where i have share more insights from StackOverflow. [https://medium.com/railsfactory/ruby-is-not-dying-its-aging-like-fine-wine-952880cecb01](https://medium.com/railsfactory/ruby-is-not-dying-its-aging-like-fine-wine-952880cecb01)https://magesh.io/will-smith-autobiography/https://magesh.io/will-smith-autobiography/Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT Listening to Will Smith share his life story while I’m on a long drive along the ECR on a Sunday evening. Have to give it to him. He is one hell of a story teller. Very articulative and impressive. If I ever create an audio book this is how I’d wanna do it. One of the lessons I heard from him today is this: Imagine you’re gearing up to fight an opponent like Mike Tyson. You hire the best coach in the world, train like a beast, and give it everything you’ve got, but you still take a hit. That’s a loss you can hold your head high for. But, if you skimp on the prep, don’t go all in, then it’s not just Tyson you’re up against; it’s like you are up against you AND Tyson. That’s a whole other level of tough. When you’re not all in because you didn’t put in the work, it’s like you’re fighting yourself and the opponent. That’s the real knockout punch. Losing to Tyson, the best in the world, that’s one thing, but losing to yourself? That’s the real knockdown. He says that’s the worst. You can’t have that. https://magesh.io/peace/https://magesh.io/peace/Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT Found this thing online and i loved it. Instead of viewing others as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’ — simply view them as limited. Their level of consciousness limits them to unpalatable behaviors and they simply cannot do better considering their current level of understanding and awareness. They are not bad, they are simply limited. This small shift in perspective allows you greater peace, greater compassion, forgiveness and grace. Remember, the higher you move in consciousness, the less fault you find in others. https://magesh.io/a-man-called-otto/https://magesh.io/a-man-called-otto/Sun, 14 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT Note: This post contains spoilers so close this tab right now if you don't want to read before watching the movie. So, you are okay with the spoilers? Okay fine, here we go. It is a beautiful movie. I loved how Marisol continued to show love to the old man Otto even though he kept pushing her away, even though he was arrogant and rude to her. Yet, she saw what he really was underneath -- a good man who was hurting, in pain over his lost love, and going through grief without thinking about others who needed him as much as he needed them. Eventually he comes around, realises his mistake, and decides to live his life. I like the love between Marisol and Otto, they were not related, came from different countries and cultures, yet their love was pure. Marisol truly cared for Otto, making him delicious food every once in a while and saving him from himself. She gave him a reason to live and shared her family and moments with him. In the end, when she notices something is wrong with Otto because he hasn't shovelled his wall, she rushes to check immediately. That is what is know as unconditional love, a rare thing in the real world. They were not related, she didn't do all that hoping she would get his money one day. Marisol wanted to be a loving neighbour, and that's all she was. Otto says he never had anything going in his life before he met his love Sonya, and never wanted anything after she was gone. It is a beautiful love story. He wanted to take his life because he never wanted to outlive his love Sonya. But then he decides to live and eventually has all the love he needed from different people like Reuban, Anita, Marisol, Tommy, their children, the cat, Malcom, etc., helping him move on with life. When Otto found out that his old pal Reuben and his wife Anita were suffering from illness, he decides to make things right and apologises to them. He fixes their problem and helps them save their property, which was about be taken by the evil real estate company. He did all that for love, for friendship, without expecting anything in return. In the end, after Otto dies, Marisol reads his letter, which says Otto has left everything he owned to Marisol, his bank balance, car, house - even though she never asked for any of that. In the note, Otto asked her to never let anyone drive his car, not even her husband Tommy. She is seen nodding no to Tommy when he tries to get behind the wheel. Otto trusted Marisol, and she remained true to that. Otto considered everyone a stupid, but not Marisol, because she cared and loved him, and he loved her too. They were not related by blood, culture, nationality or any of that. They never cared about the money, and they were never competing with each other. They all were like one big, beautiful family. That's rare and beautiful.https://magesh.io/end-of-devc/https://magesh.io/end-of-devc/Sun, 25 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT It's sad to see the Facebook (now Meta) Developer Circles program [coming to an end](https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2023/04/27/an-update-on-the-meta-developer-circles-program/?__cft__[0]=AZXPhtx5dCMfHBBnup3oxLD_lYWVMzbQxgPWRLtA4Rv-fZ2NJpqAaNqPxiWL9pm3itRXJVdNRWGEHi_yw84e8ivFjDADdtxpu3R5l9iPis1uMeAdfBEwlX4sDcCN_feYQjCtNQdPEQ1Zsj95BWwEX2ydDjNyaHzJ3FdzvecHzoMTjUi9P25XOGudqN2PTC33YA4&__tn__=-UK-R). I've been a part of it since 2017. I vividly remember my first day when Srikanth Mohan and Chinmaya reached out to bring me on board to start the Facebook Developer Circle Chennai Community. Our very first event had over 100 participants (thanks to Srikanth). With full support from Facebook, we organized a lot of tech events such as meet-ups, hackathons, and workshops for developers in Chennai. These events were not only fun to organize but also allowed us to make many new connections and friends.  In 2018, I had the opportunity to travel to the US and Singapore for the first time in my life, all thanks to the DevC Community, and I'm so grateful for that. I got a chance to attend Facebook Developer's Conference in San Jose. The excitement of meeting so many people from around the world was unparalleled. I was filled with joy even after the event, for a month or so, replaying memories.  I made so many good friends over the last few years and learned so much from them. We still continue to stay in touch online.  We had the wonderful opportunity to work with Facebookers like Chinmaya, Jennifer Fong, Angeline, Elisha Tan, Satyajeet, Ojasvi Bhatia, and more. I've cherished all our video calls with the Facebook team throughout these years. Their passion, energy, ideas, planning, and engagement with community members from around the world were always inspiring. It never felt like they were just doing their jobs; they were wholeheartedly dedicated to creating and supporting communities. Teams like that are hard to assemble, and I relish working with such people.  They truly made us feel like one big family. I miss working with them and sincerely hope to meet them again and keep in touch. Thank you for all the support. I will forever remember the experiences we shared together. Special thanks to others who have supported us throughout this journey. My co-leads Srikanth and Arun Paul. Global & Indian DevC Leads fraternity. Members of our Chennai community. Partners, and the amazing volunteers. https://magesh.io/purpose-of-life/https://magesh.io/purpose-of-life/Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT I used to think the purpose of life was to achieve something significant, create a legacy, create a name for yourself, and so on... Later I learned, that the true purpose of life is \*living\* it. Every moment. Achievements are for the ego. Living is for the soul. Life is not a grocery list. Life is not a race. Be calm, go slow, and experience life moment to moment :) https://magesh.io/featured-on-talkoverflow-by-gdg-wtm-chennai/https://magesh.io/featured-on-talkoverflow-by-gdg-wtm-chennai/Mon, 07 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT I was on a podcast with Swaathi sometime back. She is hosting this show called TalkOverflow in partnership with Google Developers Group and Women TechMakers Chennai Community. I was really pumped to talk about developer communities here in Chennai. Listen to it by clicking on one of the following links: - [Apple podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-2-with-magesh/id1531138558?i=1000497579448) - [Anchor FM](https://anchor.fm/talkoverflow/episodes/Episode-2-with-Magesh-em57c8) - [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/01eEv6zx9bBIQg7dmiJOgE) - [Google Podcast](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8zMmZhOWZjNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/MjU0YTViMTItOTYzYS00ZGI5LWExYzQtZTQ4ZGIzMjBlM2Ni?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwjI7JW15876AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ) https://magesh.io/podcast-mentoring-running-bootcamps/https://magesh.io/podcast-mentoring-running-bootcamps/Mon, 17 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT In a conversation with [Manoj Mahalingam](https://www.facebook.com/manojlds?__cft__[0]=AZVGMwRDAe5wMboedTQzrhdpYPxh87LjihZu6oW7ayQ1ku19DrALcd7Z9c7MfKGm55Q9foj4rGIGDHLJJNXZ2GcnvaHYVAKkx0WfXZVtQY5LdlA1IQWkpmUSTyVg3XkrY3o7qaFVBOv-zzpTwWfGVQ1EabDYcDxvq07YZwb6kIlFyw&__tn__=-]K-R) where I talk about my current work, training developers, running bootcamps, and organizing events for the developer community. Video Link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YlMRDKBYEE...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YlMRDKBYEE&list=LLbAEzuW32rtWSylOOLBqWxA&index=2&t=0s&fbclid=IwAR1RJI7pGwm5E-PxVGuHEO6TUkvAZUhQG2KwKc2MRkgfTzF2TGdHhAT-ocM) Podcast Link: [https://anchor.fm/.../Training--mentoring-and-running...](https://anchor.fm/stacktoheap/episodes/Training--mentoring-and-running-bootcamps-eheend?fbclid=IwAR1RJI7pGwm5E-PxVGuHEO6TUkvAZUhQG2KwKc2MRkgfTzF2TGdHhAT-ocM) https://magesh.io/the-intern-movie-review/https://magesh.io/the-intern-movie-review/Fri, 17 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT I just finished watching this beautiful movie. The intern. Rober Di Nero and Anna Hathaway are at their best. It is definitely a well-written movie. The story of Ben, an old man, a widower who joins as a senior Intern at an e-commerce company run by a young, passionate woman named Jules. Amazing how Ben keeps himself busy with all kinds of activities at the age of 70, after losing his wife and living his life alone after retirement. Jules trying to balance her work and personal life to work things out with her stay-at-home husband. The friendship between Ben and Jules is totally envious. The fashion startup that Jules own and the amazing people who work there. They are not just colleagues, they are more like a family. Everything is just so good. I love this movie. If you haven't watched it yet, you should, today. It's available on Prime. Rating - 5/5 https://magesh.io/daredevil-review/https://magesh.io/daredevil-review/Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT I just finished watching 3rd season of Marvel's Daredevil series. Late to the game but who cares. Daredevil is an artistic masterpiece. One of the best superhero movies/series ever made. It's a shame they had to cancel the show because it didn't do well in terms of money. Totally love how the story has been written and brought to life by the talented writers & cinematographers. Love all the characters, story, action and everything feels so damn real. Matt Murdock, the protagonist has no special powers except that he is blind and has all the other senses heightened. He is a Catholic struggling with the notions of right and wrong. Charlie cox fits the role so well. Makes you think no one else could have pulled it so well. Karen Page, Foggy Nelson, Wilson Fisk, Frank Castle. All the characters are just perfect. This would probably be my favorite of all the Marvel movies/series. There are no magic hammers or people flying in the sky. It's a crime drama and not the usual superhero movie. That's why it is so good. I will come back and watch all three seasons again. I will think more and write an essay about this in my blog later. It definitely deserves a big blog post. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go find the writers, and cinematographers to send them an appreciation tweet 😃 https://magesh.io/guvi-zen-class/https://magesh.io/guvi-zen-class/Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT  I spent 6 days at Guvi teaching React as part of their Zen class Bootcamp. I was teaching 30+ people. Most of them were students and we also had a few professionals who wanted to learn and level up their career. The group had different levels of competency, fast, slow and medium learners. I was able to get almost all of them to build a simple application using React and in the process taught all the fundamentals.  I learnt that, as a coach, while teaching you need to do a face reading of the audience to figure out who understood the concept that is being discussed and who didn’t, as you speak. During the bootcamp I would ask individuals, “Hey pal, I’m not getting any signal from you, are you with me? Do you understand”. In case if some look confused, you need to figure out why they are not able to follow, understand the problem and help them get to the next level. If they are in level 0, get them to level 1. If they are in 1, get them to level 2. Always make sure whatever you teach is received well at the other end by not just a few but _all_. Spend 1:1 time with the participants. Create a friendly environment for them to learn and have fun.  I really had a good time with those students. Loved their passion to learn new things. They kept on asking a lot of questions to learn more and more in the limited time they spent with me. I like that.  Kudos to Guvi folks for successfully kickstarting their first bootcamp, Zen class. 30+ people had signed up to be a part of it. These students are trained in full stack development, frontend, backend and more in one month. They are also asked to build small applications which will be reviewed by the team. That is amazing. They are doing what engineering colleges are supposed to do. I’m glad I was part of this programme. If you are looking to hire freshers you can talk to Guvi and maybe hire few of the bootcamp participants. https://magesh.io/linux-ransomware-attack/https://magesh.io/linux-ransomware-attack/Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT Everyone has been talking about this ‘WannaCry Ransomware’ attack for the past few days. My Facebook TL is filled with links and articles on the same. I was ignoring the news for few days and then people started forwarding text on Whatsapp, funny memes and etc. I finally had to read, just to find out what the fuzz was about. That’s when I realised, we have experienced something similar two or three years ago. We didn’t know what it was. But we have solved this for a client. It was on the news this time because it was done on a bigger scale. About 200,000 computers in 150 countries have been affected so far. ## The Story One of our long time customers, Varun \[name changed\] had just started a new e-commerce project with us. They had a magento website which was live and had too many bugs, so we were building a better version of the website using Rails and Spree from scratch. They had around 50 customers placing orders from time to time. One day, I got a call from Varun around lunch time. “Magesh, our server is down. Something is wrong. Our Magento developer is not available right now. Can you look into this?”, he asked. I said yes, got all the credentials from him and ssh’d into his server to find out what went wrong. I saw something we have never seen before. It was weird. All the PHP code files and folders were encrypted (All those files had a .encrypt or similar extension). I tried to open the files but all I saw was random letters, numbers or symbols. That’s when we figured, someone has encrypted all the files, making it inaccessible for the web server to load the pages and that is why the website was down. I started thinking of the possibility of someone known to Varun doing this to get back at him for some reason. While I was wondering who could have done something as stupid as this. I saw a README-To-Decrypt file inside the same folder which was not encrypted. Now, that’s weird. Why would someone encrypt all the files and leave a manual to help decrypt them. It doesn’t make any sense. I opened the README-To-Decrypt file and laughed. It read: > If you wish to decrypt all your files, you have to transfer 200$ to this paypal account. some-random@email.com What in the world is this? Who is this guy? and why did he hack this server? I called Varun and told him about what I saw. “Magesh, we have to solve this immediately. We are getting a lot of calls from customers. Shall I transfer the payment to the hacker?”, he asked. I told him, “No Varun. You don’t have to do that. Your server has been hacked because it wasn’t secured. If you have a backup of those code files and the data, I can fix this today.” Luckily, Varun had a backup of all the files. It would have been really difficult if he didn’t have the backup. He then sent us all the code files, database backup. It was a Virtual Private Server, so we took a backup of all the existing data, erased everything on the drive and re-installed the latest version of the OS. Added a bunch of security settings like disabling root and password login. Adding authorised ssh keys for login and etc. To avoid brute-force attack and unauthorised access. Once that was done, everything was back to normal. The problem was: Varun had the server set up by a freelancer a few months ago, who apparently, did not care much about the security just like many other developers in our country who ignore such things. The unknown hacker used brute-force to find the password for root login and he must have executed a script (ransomware) which automatically encrypts the essential files on the server and holds it like a hostage. Leaving a message asking for a ransom. What we experienced might not be WannaCry Ransomware. But it was something similar. People think these Ransomwares can only attack Windows machines. Nope, your Linux machine can also be compromised unless you have all the security settings in place. In fact, the server Varun had was a Ubuntu (Linux) Linode instance, which was hacked. So, if you are a developer, building softwares for people. You need to think of security as the most important thing. Make sure that no one can hack into your server and even if they manage to do it somehow, make sure the critical data is encrypted and is hard to decrypt. For the safety of your customers. Also, make sure you keep a backup of all the files and data somewhere safe on a different machine. If possible have multiple copies. It will come handy when something like this happens. > At Hash14, we build amazing web applications, tools and APIs for customers. Solving problems and reducing their everyday work using technology. Have an idea? Let’s talk! https://magesh.io/chennai-geeks-react-js-meetup/https://magesh.io/chennai-geeks-react-js-meetup/Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT We had a great time at the Chennai Geeks meetup today. The topic was "React JS for beginners" (based on people's vote) and more than 50 people turned up. Vysakh Sreenivasan was the speaker, and his session was Amazing. He started the code demo with basic vanilla JS and moved on to React step by step, comparing both the code of vanilla JS and React to show people how React really works and what it does to the DOM. He also showed us how to use Npm, Components, DOM render, handling events, ES6, JSX syntax and etc. The session was interactive, people asked a lot of questions and made sure they learn all the basic essentials of React before leaving the room.   Thanks to Vysakh for taking the time to be there with us. Also, Thanks to folks at OrangeScape for hosting us today,Suhail, Venkatesh, Dinesh and Suresh Sambandam. People are more interested in having JS related sessions like, Angular, Vue JS, Node JS, React-Native and so on. If any of you are interested in doing a talk on any of the above topics for the next meetup, let me know. Also please feel free to give us your suggestions on how we can improve this meetup or what kind of events would you like to attend in the future. https://magesh.io/building-chatbots-chennai-geeks-meetup/https://magesh.io/building-chatbots-chennai-geeks-meetup/Mon, 26 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT Here's a quick summary of the Chennai Geeks December Meetup, this event was about "Building Chatbots" **Siddharta** started with the intro talk by explaining a bit about the importance of chatbots in today's world and continued with a hands-on tutorial, showing us how to build a slackbot from scratch using slack's API. He also talked about python's NLTK and Spacy library for Natural language processing, analyzing the sentiment of the received message and to make the bot reply with an apt text. He also spoke about wit.ai APIs (hosted solution) that you can use when you don't want to do the 'NLP' part on your own. Then we had lightning talks. Five people had volunteered to show a demo of the chatbots they've built. **Demo 1:** First one to go was Hariharan, he showed us his E-commerce bot based on telegram APIs which would display a short list of items. A user can select the items, enter the quantity and click pay button. Here's the video link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arp28qcnLqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arp28qcnLqM) He also showed us another simple valet parking bot, which can take a token number as input and ask the valet guy to get the vehicle ready so that the customer doesn't have to wait too long for the car to arrive from the parking space. Video link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH8HgiP0LcA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH8HgiP0LcA) **Demo 2:** Bhavani showed us the interview-bot which greets the user, asks him to select a programming language and competence level to begin the test. Questions are displayed to the user based on his competence level. Users can paste code into the code editor, run it and submit to the bot for evaluation and then scores will be given to each candidate. All the results will be stored on an excel spreadsheet for the interviewer to review finally. She also mentioned another case where the bot would adjust the level of the user based on questions answered. Answering two questions correctly will take him to the next level automatically. She used a bit of luis.ai APIs for NLP. **Demo 3:** Trivikram showed us a Python tutor bot which can answer basic questions on Python programming language. It fetches answer from the database matching the question and sends it to the user. If the answer is not available in the DB, it would open a browser and display google search results matching the question. T he bot can also challenge the user with random question from the database upon user's request and it has the ability to compile code with user-defined inpu(using hackerrank's api). It can also store user data (like levels or course he took last time) and continues from where he left, the next time he logs in. Finally, as a bonus he showed us his usual bot to bot conversation demo, where a waiter bot displays food menu to the user, he then selects the items to be ordered, waiter bot confirms the order and commands the chef-bot to prepare the food. He used api.ai for NLP and configuring the intent and responses. **Demo 4:** Ashish showed us the code he used to build a bot for his college's computer science club which answers a bunch of questions about the club and also gives the student a programming challenge (question). The bot can also answer basic technology questions that the user asks, if the answer is not known, the bot would open stack overflow search results matching the question in a browser. **Demo 5:** Praneeth from Paypal showed us a demo of his PayPal customer support agent bot which can read customers questions and suggest solutions or create a dispute ticket in their dispute management portal. They usually get these kinds of questions from customers all the time so this chatbot helps automate the process, saving a lot of time for support engineers. Hope everyone had a good time watching all these demos. Thanks to Pravin Shekar and Ramesh for hosting us at Krea's Office. Thank you Siddharta for the introduction tutorial. Thanks, Bhavani, Trivikram, Ashish, Hariharan and Praneeth for volunteering to do the lightning talks/demos. Take a look at the photo album for more pics: [https://www.facebook.com/iMagesh/media_set?set=a.10209971335074336.1073741828.1663955416&type=3](https://www.facebook.com/iMagesh/media_set?set=a.10209971335074336.1073741828.1663955416&type=3) https://magesh.io/organising-a-community-event-chennai-geeks/https://magesh.io/organising-a-community-event-chennai-geeks/Fri, 15 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT I've been inactive on the Chennai Geeks community for the last two years and this year I decided to change that. The group was slowly becoming inactive and [Dorai Thodla](http://twitter.com/dorait) is the only one who keeps it going these days. So, i wanted to help him by volunteering and organising events. [Karthick](https://twitter.com/yeskarthik) and [Madhu](https://twitter.com/madhuvishy) used to do that before but they are not in the country now.  We had a meeting on Jan 2016. I went there after a long time and it was nice to meet like-minded people and engage in conversation. We discussed about Machine learning and Functional programming. It was interactive, people were sharing their knowledge about FP and 2 hours flew by. That's when I thought it would be interesting to have a separate event for Functional programming, everyone seem to be interested in it. Even I wanted to try FP sometime. Few days later, I texted Dorai about the next Chennai geeks event and he said [Karthikeyan Mani](https://twitter.com/keyanmk) from [ByteAlly](https://twitter.com/keyanmk) has volunteered to do a talk or workshop on functional programming. He also asked me if i can coordinate and help organise the event. I said yes. That could be fun. Okay, now where do i start? The topic is Functional Programming and speaker is chosen, We need to decide whether it's going to be a hands-on workshop or usual talk kind.  **Voting** Since it's a community event, it has to be of people's choice right? I created a [poll](https://www.facebook.com/groups/chennaigeeks/permalink/1162769550414749/?qa_ref=qd) on our Facebook [group page](https://www.facebook.com/groups/chennaigeeks/) and asked people to start voting. We waited three days and saw there were more votes for workshop. _Ting ding ding_ We have a winner. What next? I have to find a good place to host about 30-40 people. I figured more people would RSVP because FP is a very interesting topic. **Finding a place to host the event** We have many startup founders within the community who have generously offered their office space for us to host events. For the past few years [Suresh](https://twitter.com/sureshsambandam) has let us have our monthly meetings at OrangeScape's office. Dorai said, we can host the workshop at the same place. While discussing with Karthikeyan, he said ByteAlly's new office can host about 40-50 people. Now we have two places available, wow that's amazing. Next thing is to find out how many people are actually going to participate. Karthikeyan and I fixed a date for the event and created a [Facebook event page](https://www.facebook.com/events/767104556752917/) to let people RSVP. I also asked them to Register on a google form just so we know they're really interested. **Getting things ready** We started getting a lot of RSVPs on fb event page and on the google form. I was thinking how embarrassing it would be if no one RSVPd but there was lot of response coming in everyday. Karthikeyan and i were counting the registrations. He called me few days later and asked if we should close the registration since its going beyond 40 and we have limited seats. But then Dorai said, usually the turnout is 50% of the total registrations. That's true, it's a free event, everybody wants to register and save themselves a seat just in case. So we kept it rolling and closed at somewhere around 65. That's a great number. Even if 50% came, we would have around 32 people. That's A LOT OF PARTICIPANTS. I then called Karthikeyan to ask if he needed help in getting the place ready for the event. He said, "everything is taken care, snacks and refreshment is on the house". I know him for a long time so i knew he would do it best. When i asked him for the agenda, he sent me a neat PDF with the schedule. He was prompt and took so much care to make this event a successful one. He hired chairs with pads for the attendees, ordered pizzas and everything. So i had nothing left to do. **WiFi connectivity** The next thing to worry about is WiFi. I've been to many events where the biggest problem people had was wi-fi connectivity. "Dude, help me connect to the wi-fi", "why am I not able to connect, did the router max out or something?". Having seen all that in many events, I checked with karthikeyan if he has good broadband connection with more bandwidth. He said they have a 60 Mbps connection. But then we decided not to rely on it entirely, you know things could go wrong no matter what you do, heard of Murphy's law? So we asked people to install the tools before coming to the workshop and thought of having the setup files on a pen drive incase people had wi-fi issues. **Sponsors** A day before the event, Someone posted on the event page asking if he can pay for the snacks and refreshment. In return he asked if it's okay to put up a banner and talk a bit about his company. This being a community event we said banners and promotions are not allowed. We also didn't want to take payment because this is completely a free event. But since he asked we allowed him to give a shout out about his company towards the end of the event. **D Day** On the day of the event, i got ready a little early and went to the venue to help Karthikeyan. But everything was already set. There was one guy working really hard on his desktop and I came to know that he was the speaker for today's event, Sri Nidhi along with his partner Magesh (ByteAlly team) has been working on presentation and sample codes throughout the night without much sleep. Hard workers. We printed the attendee list to make sure everyone who registered online gets a seat. We posted google maps link on the even page for people to find the place without any difficulty. We also stuck print-outs outside the building. People started coming in one by one and soon we had about 35 people. All of them were waiting for the speakers to start, patiently. None of them left home during the breaks, everyone was wired to their laptops working on sample codes without any distraction. That's the kind of attendees you'd like to have when you host a workshop. They were all so passionate, stopped the presenters once in a while to ask questions and help out fellow attendees when they had trouble.  It went on till 1:30 pm and we had to stop because two hours was the plan. Pizzas came in and nobody moved until we asked them to. Then i went around talking to some of the participants, taking feedback and asking them to join the Facebook group and volunteer for future talks. After networking for about 30 mins or so, people started leaving. All of them were happy that we organised an event like this. [Kiran](https://twitter.com/kirang89), one of the participants said he was surprised to see Functional Programming workshop happening in Chennai.  After the event Dorai posted a comment, "To me this is a big event. For the first time, an active member takes charge and runs the program based on the demands of the community. I am so proud. Hope to have more people from the community taking similar initiatives. That process makes this event more sustainable". I couldn't agree more. As an organiser all i had to do is bring people together and everything worked out on its own. I didn't do much. That's how a community event should be. We need more active members organising different kinds of event with interesting topics instead of one guy doing it all the time. Chennai Geeks is an informal group, anyone can volunteer to talk about anything in technology or organise workshops/hackathons. All you have to do is post an update on our Facebook group or send an email to our [mailing-list](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chennaigeeks).  **Photos from the event** [https://www.facebook.com/groups/chennaigeeks/permalink/1170467259644978/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/chennaigeeks/permalink/1170467259644978/) https://magesh.io/we-are-hash14-now/https://magesh.io/we-are-hash14-now/Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT \[Note: The post first appeared on [hash14's blog](https://blog.hash14.com/we-are-hash14-now-73f56fc07a06#.9kgakjyqq)\] We bootstrapped this little startup of ours with zero investment two years ago. Since I had no prior experience running a business i wanted to give it a shot and understand everything about this business, being a technology consultant, building products for clients and helping them scale to large user base. Over the last two years we have learnt so much that we now have started advising young and early stage startups (our clients) on how to go about building their product and making it a success. We have done a lot of experiments in the past and learnt things the hard way — and now we are planning to raise the bar a bit more. We’re rebranding, moving into a better office, hiring more developers and executing things in a much better way. To provide an even more better service for our customers. When we started out first, we decided to do what we know best, building products. Though there are a lot of people and company that are into technology consulting, very few are capable of doing it the best. They either lack the quality or the commitment. Well, that’s what we want to change. We want to make outsourcing of technology painless and easy for startups and small companies. If you ask our clients they will tell you about our work and the kind of support they get. Making outsourcing painless is one thing and the other is, to build error-less and high quality products. We’ve been doing that for the last two years and now we are getting even better. We hope to expand our clientele much faster this year. Building amazing products and making it big. Wish us good luck and watch this space for more updates. Thank you. Also, give us a hi5 if you like the new name and logo :) Checkout our new website [http://hash14.com/](http://hash14.com/) https://magesh.io/way-to-success/https://magesh.io/way-to-success/Fri, 31 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life – think of it, dream of it, live on idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. \-- Swami Vivekananda https://magesh.io/designing-a-product-steve-jobs-quote/https://magesh.io/designing-a-product-steve-jobs-quote/Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT <quote> Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. - Steve Jobs </quote> https://magesh.io/a-day-in-my-life/https://magesh.io/a-day-in-my-life/Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT (Note: I wrote this post for [Samyuktha's](http://twitter.com/samyu_d) StoryboardDays [Blog](http://storyboarddays.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/magesh-sadhasivapandiansoftware-engineerchennai/).) Few months back an incident happened, someone tried to rob our house early in the morning at around 2 AM but to their surprise, I was awake working. Noticing this,the thief ran away. Again few days later the same thing happened, this time those thieves came at around 3 AM thinking I would have slept by then but surprise surprise, I was still working. They made some 2-3 theft attempts and every time the lights would be on and I would be working. Those thieves must have thought that I am some kind of an in-house night watchman and they never came back. No such attempts were made after that, thanks to the in-house night watchman Me. So that’s how my life goes, like a nocturnal animal. My nights are usually longer than the days, by the time I wake up half of the day would have gone past. So being a night person (or should I say owl?) let me start with how the hours roll by at night. I get back home from office normally at around 7:30 pm, reaching home I usually have a cup of tea and play with my two-year old little nephew for sometime. Then I switch on the wi-fi to check whatsapp messages, tweets, instagram photos and other social updates. After that, i spend about 30-60 mins reading books. I am currently reading ‘ReWork’ by Jason Fried & DHH. I prefer reading ‘startup’ and tech books mostly. While i read, the little boy at home would be running around shouting and pulling my shirt, sometimes he would stop by to ask Why am i talking to the book? Sometimes I read the book out loud that he thinks I am talking to the book. I watch a couple of Friends episodes to relax, and usually around then my mom would yell calling us for dinner. After dinner, I talk to dad, mom and sister about what’s happening in the family and office. Sometimes dad and I debate about random topics like politics, love, religion or god which will go on for hours. I wrap up the day with some work if there’s any, pushing code to github or deploying something on the production server. So that’s what happens on a normal evening, and on special days when we have an important launch or something, everything changes. No reading and no sitcoms, instead I spend some time with little nephew and get back to work. During a launch, work goes on till 3 AM , otherwise I go to bed at around 1 or 2 (Got used to sleeping late). Most of the times while going to bed, i plug-in the ear phones, and would quickly fall asleep listening to nice melodies.. About my morning life, I have always dreamt about getting up early in the morning at 6, go jogging on the sea-shore and spend some time meditating, get back home around 7:30 to grab a cup of coffee or tea. But damn, that never happens.. What do I actually do in the morning? hmm.. “Morning? have you ever seen it?”, that’s my mom shouting from the kitchen. Well, I wake up at around 8:30 or 9 in the morning, watch some funny videos (yes, again Friends episodes) to start the day with some positive vibes. I don’t have the habit of reading news papers or magazines, instead I check my twitter feeds to see what’s going in the world. I also spend some time reading startup/tech articles on popular blogs like techcrunch, hackers news and yourstory. Later, I check the official emails and reply to the important ones. Then I slowly get ready, have brunch and go to office which is very close to my house. By the time I reach office, people would have accumulated 5-10 bugs for me to fix, and as soon as I enter the office they would welcome me with all the love and affection (Sometimes they even sing songs to welcome me). I straight away get to work by fixing bugs raised by customers or sellers and reply to emails. Usual things that a tech guy does at an e-commerce office, nothing new. I love the work culture at Shopo. I can work from office or home or anywhere I’m comfortable, but the main thing that matters to us is meeting deadlines, we make sure that things get done before the agreed deadline. Most of the times i go to office and work, and sometimes work from home. There’s another interesting thing, our office doesn’t have a corporate set-up with cubicles and other things that induces stress in you automatically, instead we work out of a beautiful house in Thiruvanmiyur, not so far from the beach (pretty close actually). So work is always fun at office, we pull each others leg and have fun between work, we also listen to music while working and sometimes we play fun games as well. And soon after the games, everyone would get back to whatever work they were doing earlier, and the room becomes silent, hours would pass and after sometime people would start yawning one by one during that post luch period, and that’s when inji tea (ginger tea) comes to the rescue, We all take a walk to the nearby tea kadai(tea stall) and have this amazing inji tea that refreshes the brain and makes you active. While sipping the tea, we gossip about start-ups, love stories and more. Then we walk back to office to continue work, if someone comes up with a new idea, a discussion would begin where we all share our thoughts and contemplate to see if it might actually help improve the business. That’s another advantage of working for a startup, you get to hear about many things from technology to sales and marketing, which is not possible in big companies. So we discuss for sometime, bounce ideas and get back to work again. I work on some new features, writing code and once in a while switch to bug-fix mode. Once in few days I go out with my office friends, last week we all went to the nearby KFC to stuff our face with some yummy crispy chicken, and last month we all went to the nearby theatre to watch “Vishwaroopam”. Having a little fun outside work helps us keep up the excitement, otherwise we’d get bored of the routine. And as the day comes to an end,I leave office at around 7 pm, sometimes I stay at office till 8 or 9 pm that would happen mostly during an important launch, there was one time when all of us in the tech. team were staying up all night to launch Shopo version 2 (revamp), we were awake coding all night without food (seriously!) and time was zipping past, by the time we could fix all the bugs and deploy the new version it was 5 AM in the morning, and again there was few more changes to be done, finished them quickly and went back home at around 6 AM to get some sleep. Work is always interesting because we all work out of deep passion, there’s no stress or people micro managing you. So this is the routine I follow. It’s fun and satisfying but the only problem working for startup is, its hard to get sometime to go out & find a girlfriend for yourself or to find time for a date in case you already have a girl friend. In that case your laptop becomes the girlfriend, come home late night and you’ll hear my mom yelling at me, “Why are you sitting with that laptop all the time?”, “You stare into that laptop all the time at office and even after reaching home why do you want to do the same?”, “Why are you up late night, can’t you get some sleep? its 3AM already!” And for that I would reply, “Ok mom, I was just going to shut down the laptop and hit the bed, okay! i’m going now..”, i hit the bed and after a while mom would yell again, “Now what the hell are you doing with that phone?”. I don’t know why but putting myself to sleep every night is so hard, as if the world would end if I go to sleep. And during weekends when I am not working or sleeping, i attend start-up and tech events that happens in Chennai. I often go to the Chennai Geeks monthly meetings, would participate in hackathons. Otherwise, I spend some time tweeting or hanging out at the nearby Thiruvanmiyur beach or I chill at some mall or theater with friends or family. So there is fun, work, and lot of start-up lessons filled in my everyday life > "Big thanks to my colleague and friend Magesh(I call him Thambu) for writing this post.This very talented guy does some brilliant work for Shopo. He is a little shy, but has over 2000 followers on Twitter! you can follow him [here](http://twitter.com/iMagesh)" - Samyuktha https://magesh.io/chennai-geeks-meetup/https://magesh.io/chennai-geeks-meetup/Sun, 16 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT I've always been a part of the [Chennai geeks community](http://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=chennai%20geeks%20group&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgroups.google.com%2Fgroup%2Fchennaigeeks&ei=zzhWUKL1KcuIrAfp_YDYAQ&usg=AFQjCNGk2I2XSz1yWMwxGKMNn24cLeL7tw), used to attend most of the monthly meetup and I also follow the Facebook group activities. We meet on the 3rd saturday of every month to discuss about the trends in technology followed by an informal discussion where people share their experience about the technology they work with and the problems that they solved recently. It usually goes on for 2 hours (not more than that) but it's so absorbing and inspiring to see the geeks in action with some code and stuffs. Everytime when I get back home after the Chennai geeks meetup I used to feel so motivated and want to try something that they demonstrated during the meetup. After attending most of these meetups for the past 2 years, this month i got a chance to give a talk here. Every month we used to have some kind of voting on different topics to see which one should be discussed during the next meetup, and someone has to volunteer to give a talk. So this month (September 2012) we had a voting in the [facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/chennaigeeks/) and people wanted Ruby on Rails session. So I volunteered to do a hands-on session to get people started with RoR. Last saturday the meetup happened, I was there at the railsfactory mount road office along with the other chennai geeks. Started the talk at around 11:30 and it went on till 1:30pm, that's like 2 hours Man! I never thought i could do such long tech talks. This is actually my second tech/public speech, the first one that i did was during [Mobile Camp Chennai](http://imagesh.in/mobile-camp-chennai-at-iit/) which happened at IIT a year ago. [Madhu](http://twitter.com/madhuvishy) has a nice write-up, a summary of my chennai-geeks talk in her [blogpost](http://blog.madhuvishy.in/ror-chennaigeeks-sep-2012/). People were so active, they asked a lot of questions and made the session more interactive. Soon after the talk was over i got some [good feedbacks](https://www.facebook.com/groups/chennaigeeks/permalink/485054121519632/) from the people which made me feel so great, that's a good feeling. Maybe I should do this again and again (i mean the public talks/presentations). But it was kind of hard to teach Rails in 2hrs because there are so many things that you have to talk about in order to make the audience feel easy and comfortable with this new framework. Otherwise, you might end up confusing them. So I'm happy that the people understood and found my talk really interesting. Actually i was waiting for a chance to contribute back to this amazing community that taught me so much and I'm glad that happened :) https://magesh.io/mentoring-kcg-students/https://magesh.io/mentoring-kcg-students/Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT <p> Mentoring students at KCG college of technology, karapakkam Chennai during apps24 </p>      https://magesh.io/mobile-camp-chennai-at-iit/https://magesh.io/mobile-camp-chennai-at-iit/Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT Gave a quick tech talk + demo on “How to create a simple mobile app using @appcelerator’s Titanium” at Mobile Camp Chennai (at IITM) today! This is my first Tech/Public Talk. Received a lot of positive feedbacks from people, feels so good and I also learnt a lot. Thankyou :)        https://magesh.io/breathe-zen-habits/https://magesh.io/breathe-zen-habits/Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT [Breathe. | zen habits](http://zenhabits.net/breathe/) This is one among the awesome blogs that i love to read. The author writes everything about simplicity in the daily chaos of our lives.. teaches us how to create something amazing, find happiness, getting great things done, and living in the moment :) I love Leo Babauta’s writing (Zenhabits) https://magesh.io/software-freedom-day/https://magesh.io/software-freedom-day/Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT Software Freedom Day 2010 Celebration in Chennai         https://magesh.io/sapling-project/https://magesh.io/sapling-project/Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT  [The Sapling Project](https://www.facebook.com/TheSaplingProject/) is a good intiative by two innovative people Satish(@bombaylives) & Ranjeet(@ranjeet_walunj). The goal of this intiative is to make planting & growing trees a habit among people, by giving away free saplings to individuals living in colonies and apartments, asking them to plant, nurture and also monitor the health and progress of the sapling for atleast two years. Isn’t that great? **Why should we do this?** We all complain about the heat, rapidly changing climate and also the natural calamities like Tsunami, earthquake and so on.. Have you ever thought on, what is happening to our planet “Earth”? Why are we sufferring these disasters? The answer to all these questions is “Ecological unbalance”, a weakening in the Earth’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere means that global warming is happening faster than we thought. Its all due to the lack of Trees and Plants(to absorb the carbon dioxide).People cut down many trees to build house, business etc.. but they forget to plant the trees again. We’ve learnt and talked more about “The Global Warming” for more than a decade, but what have we done so far to save our Planet? i heard you say ‘nothing’. So People, its high time we stop complaining and start acting. Come on Lets work for a cause To Breathe Easy, Lets Plant more Trees **So What should i do now?**  Its very simple, lets support the Sapling Project, which is happening in more than Five cities in India. The next Sapling Project Drive is Scheduled for June 6th 2010 in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and more.. [Click this for more info](https://www.facebook.com/TheSaplingProject/) - **Individuals:** Can be a part of the event, support by either planting or Donating the saplings. - **Journalist’s/Blogger’s:** Be there with us this sunday in any of the above mentioned Cities, write about the event in your blog/journal which might help spread the awareness. - **Photographers:** Can be a part of the event, click pictures, share it with friends and relatives. If your City is not mentioned above than you can take the intiative, connect your friends and start The Sapling Project Drive in your City. Contact Satish or Ranjeet for more info. **Are you in Chennai?** Yay! Then join me & Rajasekarn this sunday (6th June 2010). Participate, plant saplings or donate **CHENNAI VENUE 1:** Isha Project Green Hands,<br /> No. 5 Moolachathiram,<br /> Perumal Kovil St, MMC Post,<br /> Chennai 51<br /> Time: 10:00 AM<br /> **CHENNAI VENUE 2:** Peter’s Colony<br /> Royapettah<br /> Chennai - 600014<br /> Time: 3:00 PM<br /> [View it on Google Map](https://www.google.co.in/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode&q=peters+colony+royapettah&sll=21.125498,81.914063&sspn=43.265837,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq&hnear=Peters+Colony,+Royapettah,+Chennai,+Tamil+Nadu&z=15&iwloc=A) We need volunteers now (Chennai), If you are really interested then contact me, **Magesh**<br /> phone: 9940305209<br /> twitter: @imagesh<br /> (or) **Raja**<br /> phone: 9840727371<br /> twitter: @rajasekarn<br /> https://magesh.io/shashi-tharoor-tweetup/https://magesh.io/shashi-tharoor-tweetup/Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT Whenever i meet my friends, i tell them about the benefits of being on twitter coz i’ve been exposed to loads right from the day I joined twitter until now, connecting new people and learning a lot from them every day. This blog post is about one such awesome Opportunity that i got via twitter, Meeting our Minister of State for External Affairs Mr. Shashi Tharoor.  We the people of chennai often organize tweetups to connect new people and have fun, in the month of march two of our tweepals (twitter friends) @shalinipv and @narayananh by chance happened to know that Mr. Tharoor, yes The Minister was in Chennai and soon they got in touch with the people at Mr.Tharoor’s office. The Most Shocking thing was, We have all been to government offices and have had the experience of running from pillar to post. And here we were, not even having to move out of a chair and being successful in getting an audience with a man of such stature (by just sending an email to Tharoor ji’s office). Here was the true power of the internet. A tweetup was organized the next day ( 19th March Friday at C.P Art Center Eldams road ), for the chennai people to meet Mr. Shashi Tharror  The next day eve, we all were gathered at the venue to meet Mr.Tharoor, Apparently the honourable minister was running temperature and others had advised that this meet be cancelled but to our surprise, Tharoor ji decided not to cancel the tweetup inspite of his illness. And came in little after 8pm having taken a few minutes break after his previous engagement. The next 45mins was action packed, with many people asking intelligent questions to Dr.Tharoor. He was so elegant, the way he answered every questioner caught me by surprise, How can a man in such a position could talk like that, Hats off to Mr.Tharoor ji I’ve heard a lot about Dr.Tharoor on twitter but this is the first time that i got an opportunity to meet and know him well. I will never forget this awesome day in my life. Thanks to all those people who made this wonderful tweetup possible :) https://magesh.io/mashable-social-media-meetup/https://magesh.io/mashable-social-media-meetup/Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT      https://magesh.io/real-farmville/https://magesh.io/real-farmville/Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT Do u like playing Farmville on FaceBook? well i dont, but loved the fun in playing Real Farmville (Planting Trees in real) On 26th-Jan 2010, Chennai’s Chapter of “The Saplings Project” was organized at Dr.MGR’s School for the Hearing and Speech, Ramapuram  Early Morning when i woke up, thought only a few(may be 1 or 2 ) would be turning up for this event(planting trees) But when i reached the venue, was suprised to see a lot of people which includes the NSS volunteer’s from nearby college (Alpha College) and few from another organisation lead by Mr. Mullai Vanam and Mr. SugaVanam. By the time we reached the venue these people had finished digging pits and ready for planting.  We also went around the school and found Puratchi Thalaivar MGR’s House in the front (behind which the school is being constructed ) learnt a lot about our Dr. M.G.R’s Past life as people were discussing about him :)   Later Then we started our action, to plant these sapplings, It was fun coz @Rajasekarn, @SandeepVarma also joined along with @Kiruba and me. We planted a sapling just then @sandeepvarma branded it as “The Tedx Tree” I felt really happy coz this is the first time, i see myself doing a useful work on a Republic day   I really appreciate this idea of “Sapplings Give Away” done by people like sathish(@bombaylives), Ranjith(@ranjithwalunj) and SugaVanam. We all know that one day or the other our Earth is gonna end, becoz of these natural calamities like Global warming or Tsunami or whatever. But if we all join hands to carry out these kind of Sapling projects throughout India (later worldwide) Definitely we would hav a chance to save the world, making it a better place to live :) Friends do read about “TheSaplingsProject”, An awesome intiative started by Satish and Ranjith, do share it with your friends and relatives. Scared after watching the movie 2012? Dont worry we still have one last chance to Save the Earth (pic’s courtesy: SandeepVarma) https://magesh.io/open-source-india-techdays09/https://magesh.io/open-source-india-techdays09/Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT  Hi everybody..! This post is to share my experience at the Open Source India Tech Days ‘09, actually i was there for the last two days but missed the first day ( not being able to bunk my internal assesment tests) I really enjoyed my time there at the Chennai Trade Center Hall. I attended the second and third day of this big event, so i will tell you about what happened there on those two days. On 13th March ‘09 i was really amazed seeing so many college students at the OSI Days hall. The first speaker on that day was Mr. Narendra Bhandari of Intel He was telling us about the Mobile Technologies and its future. He enlightened us with some knowledge about the Moblin (mobile tech from Intel) he also explained about the importance for opensource in todays Business. Well i did enjoyed his speech. The next speaker on that day was Mr. Rakshat Hooja, IDA Systems  who actually introduced us with the openmokku, an opensource mobile platform based on GNU/Linux. Then Mr. Thilak Kumar of Wind River, (google’s android specialist) talked about the opensource mobile platforms and their importance in todays world. He also added some informations about the latest Handsets. And they had a nice pannel discussion expressing their overall thoughts about the opensource technologies.  The audience out there really enjoyed their speech and started shooting a lot of questions which was answered by the pannel member untiringly At the same time concurently, IBM’s workshop was going on at the nearby hall ( i was not able to attend it) Then i saw a lot of Stalls out there,  The Chennai LUG team had a stall , IBM , Lynus Academy, NRCFOSS & CDAC, IIT Mumbai and lots more (i dont remember well ) Then the last day of the OSI Techdays i.e 14th March ‘09 The first speaker on stage was a 14 year old kid ( well i should not address him as a kid because he possesses a lot of knowledge more than college students do) He was talking about his “Falling in love with FOSS, he shared all his experiences telling us how he made his hands dirty playing around Linux and the so called “Open Source Softwares”. The next speaker was Mr. Gautam Sinha, CTO Times Business Solution Limited. He shared a lot of his company experience using FOSS ( well not about his commercial facts) He told about  why the Open Source is Consumed by the IT Management.. There was a lot of people asking questions to him about the in and arounds of the IT industries and Mr. Sinha provided a better solution to all of them.  Then there was a hilarious pannel discussion by the Chennai LUG people, talking about different linux distros (Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, Opensuse,Gentoo, Ubutu & BOSS ).. Mr. Bharathi introduced Chennai LUG to the newbies and as soon as the discussion started they were about to start a flame war as to ” Which is the best Distro” Some how they managed to end the discussion Mr.Bharathi said ” Just Try what ever Distro is in your hand, and dont see which is the best” because every Distro has a similar base but one or two features may differ.. So we Audience had a nice time Then  Mr. Venkatesh kumar gave a speech introducing IBM’s Lotus Symphony ( which is an office utility collaborated with openoffice, build on Eclipse ) Then soon after the lunch Mr.Akarsh Simha  had a interesting speech  about the Desktop productivity tools… He was telling about all the things that he loved in using the KDE desktop environment… he told about many interesting features about the kde desktop which made me to try kde that evening (well i havent used kde but using gnome for more than 7months) Then Mr.Bharathi of the Chennai LUG gave an interesting speech figuring out the importance of the LUG’s in India, and what are the roles played by the lug’s to help out linux newbies. He also told about the mailing list, and how people communicate inside the community via the mailing list. People were amazed hearing about the activities of our Chennai LUG, that they were quering people at the LUG stalls to know more about the LUG’s Then Mr. Srivathsa of Dell, Mr Anil of Microsoft, Ashok krish of TCS and Mr. Shrinivasan of Cloudversity had a pannel discussion about the Career trends in FOSS, which was very much useful for the students( both school and college) Then Mr. Redhaun had a hilarious talk about the opensource business as well as opensource politics, He also shared  about his experience with foss , and the story of Compiere and Adempiere (an Open Source ERP) He also asked people to contribute to his projects.. He stated himself as a tech-mafia (thats the jovial part of his presentation) Then Mr. Ashok of TCS  was talking about Where and why Foss is used.. He also gave ideas for the students on how to decide before starting your career with foss. Then Mr. Lim kin chew, SIM university was talking about the FOSS in ASIA Thats how the OSI Tech Days came to end. We must actually thank LFY for making up such a essential fest at the right time. We also hope to have these kind of programmes to be held often around chennai. So I really enjoyed the two days at the OSI Tech Days ( Opensource Festival) If you also attended the OSI Tech Days programme or want to share something on it. Please feel free to post your comment below. https://magesh.io/fedora-classrooms/https://magesh.io/fedora-classrooms/Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT Here is another interesting thing about the web2.0 Have you ever imagined about a Virtual ClassRoom…? i have been dreaming about this for a long time and now, the Fedora people have come forward with a new method for teaching (“Fedora Class Rooms”). Those who want to learn Linux from the basics can join this Fedora Class rooms and watch Fedora Project Experts taking class on different topics from time to time… to know more about it [click here](https://href.li/?https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom) This Fedora Class room works via the IRC, classes are being held during weekends for the convenience of everyone.. To know about the classroom schedules every week, visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom Keep track of the topics for the upcoming classes and follow the UTC timing to attend classes at the scheduled time… you can also interact between the class hours by asking question related to the topics during the Q&A sessions. The instructors are very polite and ready to help. And, people willing to take classes are also invited. Check out the classroom link above to know more about registering for the classroom presentation.. For my College friends who say “I am sitting at home wasting weekends” here’s a good place for you to hangout during the weekends.. All classes will be held on irc at #fedora-classroom (channel) in irc.freenode.net. All you need to do is - have Fedora or any linux installed in your system - install the irc client such as the xchat (yum install xchat if using fedora or CentOS) - see that your system has the UTC clock to track the classroom timings - connect the irc.freenode.net - choose the channel #fedora-classroom - and stay tuned And if you couldn't attend the class for some reason, you can also view the log of the conversation later, the conversations on fedora-classrooms are being archived and kept in the fedora project wiki. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom Now this is a easy way for learning isnt it… if you have any comments or need any help regarding this post Add your comments below…..!