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I got an invitation to speak at Google Devfest 2012 at Hyderabad last Saturday. I was supposed to speak on HTML5. Google is a leading company who promote HTML5 and implement features in Chrome much ahead of time before specifications are freezes.
Photo Credit : Abhinav Saxena.
I created some html slides with the help of html5rocks.com slides using impress.js. Advantage of this over conventional powerpoint/open office was that I could embed the demos inline as these slides were also running on HTML5 compatible browser. Though Mozilla Firefox is my personal favorite , I used chrome to display the slides because a. I was going to a Google community event b. APIs like speech recognition works only in chrome.
Some of the demo did not run in chrome when the html page was run locally with file:// protocol in the URL as chrome though this is not a valid domain. For geolocation and webworker demos I had to host the html slides in a local webserver. The simplest way to start a webserver in windows I found was to use Python’s built in http server. I just typed the following
python -m http.server
And that’s it. It started a html server at port 8000. I also hosted the slides in dropbox and my own domain for backup and to allow the audience to use it later.
I had got only 30 minutes to speak but again asked to reduce to 15 to 20 minutes as event was running late and there was a hard stop time from the logistics prospective. I have never seen any Indian event running on time even if it is organized by a big corporation. Usually the time is compensated by trimming the break time which is sometimes very important in events like this from the developer’s networking perspective. I have seen some of the events like JavaOne Hyderabad had dedicated hangout time which was very productive.
Anyway while I understand the devfest organizer had no choice but to cut short the last session which was unfortunately mine . However I managed to start the session early at the scheduled time without waiting much for the audience to come back from the tea session. I also ran through the slides quite fast to make few minutes available for the vote of thanks 
I am really thankful to Bharat (Community manager of Google Developer group Hyderabad ), Bhumika Kaushik and Uttam Tripathy from Google for the opportunity and fix my slot according to my convenience.
I wish I could attend the other sessions in the morning and afternoon but I was caught up with some work. All other speakers were very young (much younger than even me ) and talented in their areas. I also met a lot of students from the colleges around Hyderabad whom I had interacted before during IEEE events.
I received a cute Android thumb drive and a nice T-shirt. Looking forward to more activities from the local GDG.
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