AppDay in a Box with GDG Kolkata

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Tags: appday firefox os kolkata mozilla

The 2nd day of GDG Devfest Kolkata 2013 saw a highly compact version of Firefox OS AppDay, aka, “AppDay in a Box”. This was the first event of its kind in Kolkata, and thanks to Jaipradeesh, we pulled off a really good show! There were about 32 participants, most of whom actively interacted during the sessions.

Who were there

Jaipradeesh had traveled all the way from Thanjavur and Soumya Deb (Debloper) had traveled from Pune, via Hyderabad, to attend this event. There were other Reps and Mozillians from Kolkata. Loads of thanks to all these people who made Mozilla’s presence go very strong at the event. This event would not have been possible with Sumantro’s help and the warm-hearted invitation from GDG Kolkata.

Who said what

Sumantro began the session by introducing Mozilla, its mission and its products. Jaipradeesh took it up from there and introduced the audience to Firefox OS and gave a comprehensive idea on how they can build webapps for Firefox OS. Next, it was my turn to speak about the Firefox OS Simulator and Developer Tools. The audience enjoyed and some were awed by the recent improvements in Developer Tools! Kudos to the DevTools team for their brilliant work! Soumya finished the session with a short demo on profiler in DevTools.

The talks were followed by an active questions/answers session. The quality of questions and eagerness to know more about Firefox OS proved that we had made a good impact on our audience. They kept on asking us questions well into the lunch time!

Idea mining

Given very less time on our hands, we decided to do an interactive ideas session on apps for FxOS. This part of the session turned highly interactive and resulted in active engagement of 90% of the audience. Some interesting ideas came up, including an alarm app where you have to solve progressive harder puzzles to stop the alarm! The app ideas were collected in an etherpad.

The wrap up

After the event, we distributed swags to everyone, with some special t-shirts for the highest voted app ideas. The session was followed by a session on Android. The event was concluded with a group photo.

Thanks for everyone for making it a success!

Photo courtesy: Biraj Karmakar.