GDG DevFest 2015 was held at The NEST I/O, Karachi on January 24, 2015.
The Nest I/O is the new technology incubator that has been opened for business since the first week of December, 2014. It is launched in Karachi in collaboration with global tech giants such as Google & Samsung. It is located on the 3rd Floor, CitiView Building, Shaheed-e-Millat Road, Karachi. You can read more about NEST I/O here.
GDG DevFest 2015 was scheduled at 11 am to 3 pm, but unfortunately it started at 12 noon. The first session of the event was ice-breaking amongst the audience. The host – Anum S. Ali (Google Ambassador from Pakistan 2014) – started the ice-breaking session by asking four simple questions from the audience, which were.
What is your name?
What is your qualification?
What do you do (job description)?
One weird fact about yourself.
After the ice-breaking session, the technical session of the event was started by Sir Imam Raza (Senior Software Architect at Folio3). The topic of his session was “Web Component and Polymer”. He beautifully explained various features used in web and android development like Shadow DOM, Vulcanisation, etc. He summarised the material design introduced in Android 5.0 by saying that “Material Design in android context means 3D look and feel on android devices”.
After the technical session, the panel discussion session was started. The panel included Ma’am Jehan Ara (President of P@SHA), Mr. Jawwad Farid (Founder of Alchemy Technologies, FourQuants and Finance Training Course) and Mr. Imran Moinuddin (CEO of NexDegree). The panel answered the queries of the audience. Most of the queries were related about NEST I/O, how the incubation centre can be fully utilised, the charges of the place, the mentoring process and future possibilities for people who be a part of the incubation centre.
The last session of the event was given by Sir Imran Moinuddin. He spoke on “The Alliance Framework”. He also referred a book entitled “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” for the audience who are interested in entrepreneurship. He explained the benefits of the ‘Alliance’ framework and that many companies are incorporating ‘Statement of Alliance’ in their work model. He said that the ‘Statement of Alliance’ is being adopted aggressively in Silicon Valley and it is based on integrity, commitment and honesty between the employees and the employer. He further added that the ‘Statement of Alliance’ is an ethically bind contract, not legally bound. He said that employers should evaluate employers on values, not on skills; because skills can be taught/learnt. He emphasised the audience to know their self worth. I personally liked his talk very much.
After these technical talks, the lunch was served and photography session was continued. It was an evening well spent..
In the last days of this year’s Ramadan, we had a training at office (Grappetite – Feb. 2012 to present). A trainer, Sir Renze J. Klamer, had come all the way from Netherlands and we all had many expectations from the training.
A pre-training evaluation was conducted of all the employees in the company in which we were inquired about ourselves, what expectations we had with this training, and our future goals after it.
Frankly speaking I didn’t expected much in the beginning. But meeting the trainer day after day, my expectations were increased exponentially. The trainer had an overwhelming personality. He had the power to convince people, judge their questions from their faces, and answer them in a way that the questioner is convinced. He had quite experience of scrum training in many countries. Despite being so busy, and moving around the globe every now and then, he had kept a perfect balance between his personal and professional life, which inspired me a lot. The CEO of Grappetite, Gertjan Van Laaris also like him in maintaining pro-personal life balance. I wish I can adopt these qualities of these two wonderful people.
First Day of Training
The day came when the training was about to start. As a matter of fact, I assume that it would be a conventional training in which the trainer would come on the stage, speak about the topics for a couple of minutes, ask questions from the audience, give some assignments and/or reading material and then bu-bye. But to my astonishment, it was completely vice-versa. The trainer started the training with a group activity which was called 3-balls activity. We all participated equally in that and after a couple of minutes we achieved the goal. This activity taught us removing waste (here distance) between team work and increased communication among the group members. Then he asked our questions related to the training in the form of posted notes and he stuck them on the board. He said all these questions will be answered in the last day of training. He then explained about scrum that it is a new framework in which we manage projects in an easy and structured way.
Scrum is actually inspired from Rugby, a game. He explained about the basic features of scrum which were:
The scrum master actually facilitates the scrum management imposed in the development.
The product owner is a part of your own company who represents the client’s demands, expectations and the priorities of work.
The team is responsible for development, designing and testing; and its size varies with the size and complexity of the project.
Important Scrum Terminologies
The term backlog actually means requirements, tasks or documentation.The two backlogs in scrum framework are Product backlog and Sprint backlog. The product backlog defines all the requirements of the product, making it a super-set; whereas the sprint backlog is the subset of product backlog, which contains the prioritized tasks scheduled to be completed in the following (upcoming) sprint. A sprint in scrum means 2-4 weeks of working in which the team completes all the tasks specified for this sprint. After these theoretical concepts, we were again asked to perform some multitasking activity, which taught us that avoid multitasking as much as possible.
Second Day of Training
The second day of training started with some more detailed insight of the roles in scrum and the backlogs. We also watched some informative videos, and studied in detail the scrum process.
Scrum Process
Then the term user stories was introduced by the trainer. He asked us to separate into two teams and then write user stories (or user demands) for a swimming pool. Both the teams performed very well and fortunately the team I belonged to, won the game. The trainer gave every member of the team a unique gift from Netherlands, a wooden shoe key chain. The last activity for the day was balloon activity in which the same two teams drew faces on the balloon. But none of the team won. The reason he explained about the failure is that the both teams were focusing to air the balloon and draw the face, but didn’t focus on the user requirement what type of face he wanted.
Last Day of Training
The third and last day of the training was filled with joy and sadness. Because we all were happy to have learnt so many new things, but sad that the training is about to end. The trainer emphasized about the importance of the two sprint plannings (known as Sprint planning I and II). I personally liked the Sprint Retrospective meeting of scrum as it focuses on not only the achievements achieved after the product completion but also on the problems dealt with. He explained some more enhanced features of scrum like the burndown chart and scrum board.
A sprint burndown chart is a graph that shows the defined planned tasks for the entire sprint as the ideal line and the effort remaining on daily basis as the actual line. The target is to achieved the zero point as soon as possible. If the actual line is below the ideal line, the planning is well executed. But if the actual line is above the ideal line, the effort is far behind what was planned.
Burndown Chart
A scrum board is actually the representation of sprint backlog execution for the sprint. It is used to see all the planned tasks (backlogs) for the sprint, tasks in progress, tasks waiting for review and task completed. The number of columns in the scrum board can increase (detailed) or decrease (brief) according to the organization.
Scrum board
He also gave us tips how can we actually implement scrum and make it successful in the first go. The last activity we performed was the managerial activity which taught us that the manager who is not part of the team doesn’t understand the problems and difficulties of the team members well enough as the team members themselves.
In the last he took out the posted notes, said the question written loud, and to my astonishment, all the questions were already answered during the training, without specifically referring to them. That manifests the quality of the training. We all had the last stand up meeting in which we all thanked the trainer and wished him luck for the future, and yes for introducing us with Scrum. We were also given certificates for successfully completing the training.
Well, that was all about scrum, in my way 😉 You can read more about scrum from its official site scrum.org.
The first GBG Women Pakistan workshop of the series of four was held on June 7, 2014 at DotZero, Karachi.
The event was started by Imtiaz Noor (Manager GBG Karachi) and Salma Jafri (Team Lead at GBG Karachi) at 9 45 am sharp. The turn out was amazing and the room was full of enthusiastic female entrepreneurs. Jehan Ara (President of P@SHA) kicked off the inaugural event and offers the support of industry association to the audience. She encouraged the females to start thinking out of the box and in case they go stuck somewhere, they can approach her. If she is not able to resolve her queries, she will make sure to get them connected with the appropriate person who could help them.
The stage was then handed over to Salma Jafri and she introduced GBG platform to the audience and disclosed the agenda of the event. She also showed a video of Lindsay Taub (GBG Women Program Lead at Google), which was specially recorded for the event. She welcomed the audience and briefly described Google Business Group and its chapters in different parts of the world.
The session of DramaMama was given by Hiba Masood where she shared her lifetime experience with the audience and encourage them to believe in themselves and shared her seven keys of success. The keys included: be confident, be honest, be kind, etc. She said that we should be proud and confident of what we do. We should also be honest when expressing ourselves. She gave example from her daily life that when she tried to follow the trends of writing on different subjects in order to gain more audience, she failed. But when she wrote in her own voice, expressed what she felt herself, she got more audience than she has expected. She has 3500+ followers on her Facebook page.
I still remember the last of her talk,
All you need is courage, courage is all you need..
I was surprised when she told that she is a mother of three small kids and how she maintains a balance in her personal and professional life. She has made a commitment to herself that she will write daily, whether it’s an essay, a short paragraph, a quotation, or anything. Her Facebook page, DramaMama is worth following.
After this, Sara Suhail’s session was started and she explained how to effectively use GoogleApps for Business. She encouraged the audience to use GoogleDrive in order to secure their important documents and also automated synchronization between different people. She also performed live demos and the audience followed them. She encouraged the audience not to fear from failure, instead learn from it.
After Sara, a young lady, Samia Bareegh, talked about communicating effectively online and meeting virtually for business. She encouraged the audience to use vacation responder feature of Gmail and also explained the feature of GoogleKeep. She also told that she frequently use Gmail offline feature in which she schedule an email to be sent (remaining offline) and the Gmail sends that scheduled email as soon as the connection gets online. She said that maximum 15 people are allowed in group video conversation using GoogleHangouts and also told one of its interesting feature, that the person currently talking in the hangout grabs the main screen.
Afterwards Salma Jafri grabs the stage and encouraged the audience to make their Content Marketing Plan. She gave the audience a questionnaire which consisted of 6 simple but important questions that should always be considered into account in order to make their Content Marketing Plan.
The last session of the session was given by Sana Saleem, a young lady and Director of BoloBhi. She scared the audience from online security threats and introduced the audience with PasswordManagers, FinFisher, Data Driven Innovation (also known as BigData), HTTPS everywhere, MIT Immersion Program, Child pornography and many more new terms. She said that passwords are first level of defense and emphasized the audience to use two-step verification process in all things.
The event was really great and it was covered by Dawn.com. There were audience’ introductions in between as well. I met so many female professionals who are or want to be entrepreneur, keeping a balance between their personal and professional life.
Looking forward for the next workshop of #GBGWomenKhi.
Information Technology Quest 