How we conducted The Mini App Days @Amritapuri – Part 02

If you are blank here with the part 02, go back to part 01  anytime and get the basics done :) so back to the topic - 04 August - The main day

Just looking back, I still remember the warden shouting at us, at about 12:15 am for again disturbing his ice, I think 3rd time in a row. Somehow he got cool and even gave us some cake to make sure we felt comfortable (nice man).

Next morning I was awoke by my phone ringing at 7:15 am by my friend and when I inquired when she had slept yesterday, since it was too early, she told me that she had lost her sleep long before :P ha. We went to the mess, after waking up all the crew-members and taking with us the flex and posters the Reps have given us the previous day mid-night. The girls too joined us from the College and we were startled to see outside participants arriving at 8:30 am onwards.  We had an awesome guidance team set-up near the main gate to redirect all the arriving participants to the Ammas hotel for their breakfast, and they did it well. I still remember Durga and Maneesha waving the only available App-Day poster at the arriving participants so that they recognized something fishy was going on. Fixing the postures was another mess. The team somehow found some thread somewhere, cleaned it up and put up almost three flex here and there in the campus. Just to get that feel :). Meanwhile, the prayer and coir team along with Santhosh somehow arranged the traditional lamp (nilavilakku) somehow and made it available in the lab. The registration desk was set-up on the ground floor with Roopak, Pooja, Anirudh's laptop and Akshay's Tab. Passing through the registration desk later, I saw them busy playing games :) after their work though.

The Reps arrived in the lab by about 10:00 am and Br. Bijuji was grateful to come and light the lamp for us. The reps too lighted the lamp in the tradition and there was one more wick left and Biju ji asked me and Tina to light that one. Lighting a lamp for the first time experience was great :). The event started and we had some problems with the Wi-Fi due to low coverage. Somehow, we could find an alternative, by sharing on of the lap PC connection via WiFi with Tina's laptop. Later, we went down to get the tea and snacks ready and that went too well. Again, as coordinators, we had to wash all the cups to make them drinkable and return the same in time, no worries. Biju Ji came to us in the meantime, appreciated our works and was happy to see our students interacting so nicely with the outside participants. Welcome to Amrita :)

The session was going fun, we distributed the swags, stickers, badges and to add to the surprises, we had the best rain of the year roaring outside, and it was again a tough job to get the participants out till the Ammas hotel to get their lunch ready.

How we conducted The Mini App Days @Amritapuri - Part 01

For a start, let me warn this is not from a developer point of view, but just ignore if I go too technical somewhere, as that happens.

The FOSS@Amrita, or our FOSS Club conducted The Mini App Days @Amritapuri, basically a technical workshop, which involves registered attendees hanging around to build apps for the newly out geek OS - The Firefox OS. The Browser technology gecko, along with B2G runs simply coded HTML files along with little JScript to add to the calculations and JQUERY, HTML5 and other technologies to style them up. The Amrita event that we hosted had almost 15 outside participants and a 35 of Amrita students itself and 3 Mozilla Reps coming in order to color thing up ! namely Naresh, Mithun and Saurabh. Detailed reports of the event is successfully hosted here :)

Coming to the organization point of view, it was of-course a fresh experience for our organization team to conduct such an event, as basically we were new to conducting anything in our college, and since it's Amrita, we have to run around a lot to get a lot of permission letters signed, and again we were in our Second Year only and we got discrete and Integral Maths :\. When I mention permission letters, I would like to mention that at one time, we had about 9 pending letters in our hand, which were all required to reach their destinations within an hour.

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For the Pre-App days on 28 September, we needn't had to worry much, expect for some lab booking problems, which arose due to one international event which got scheduled on the same day, save us! The Main day event was really an experience. Since our mentor in charge got ill, our sole hope was on our CIR head, Br. Bijukumar, who guided us throughout  the event. It was the first time, I understood, how much hurdles I need to pass even to arrange one time coffee for all the participants. We got the posters printed out somehow for free and pasting it throughout the college was lot fun, specially with my friends Bhagya, Amrutha and Pooja, selecting sensitive areas (mess, water coolers) and pasting stuff!