This was my 6th year at Sangam and as always was good fun. We were a group of 4 people who were traveling from Delhi and we reached Hyderabad on Friday morning. Just wanted to keep a day for visiting Ramoji Film City and also wanted to avoid the rush that morning travel on the conference’s starting day brings. So after dropping the luggage at the hotel we hired a taxi and reached Ramoji Film City. It is a huge place and it is tiring to move around checking everything. But fortunately on that day the weather was very pleasant so moving around was good fun. We took a ride what they call as Space Walk and watched few sets where some movies were shot. Also they have a pretty good bird sanctuary over there where they have pretty good number of beautiful birds. Spending time there was nice and fun.
By 7 PM or so we were done with everything and started back to hotel. As it was dinner time already so we directly headed to Paradise and had some awesome Biryani.
Saturday was the first day of the conference. We reached the venue by 8:30 AM and the registration was pretty quick. Before starting of the technical sessions at 10 AM, we had plenty of time to move around, meet folks especially who we know online but had never met in person. For me it was my chance to meet Tim Hall in person for the first time. Simply put Tim is brilliant. His website is an inspiration for many bloggers. It was great meeting Tim in person and striking few conversations about various technologies.
Also met Kamran for the first time in person. Been connected to him on social media for quite some time now. It was great catching up with you mate.
Had last met Francisco in Sangam 10 and this year got a chance to meet him again. The second question (first was how is job 😉 ) he asked me was “How is your blog going ?” So that calls for some focus on blogging again 🙂
Then we selected the sessions we wanted to attend and moved to respective rooms. I attended most of the sessions around database technology. There was good variety of sessions but I noticed that Engineered Systems part was missing. There could have been some sessions on Exadata, Exalogic and Super Cluster. That would make an interesting topic and would pull good audience.
Start of the second day looked little lazy but with time it caught up. There were some free time slots for me as not all sessions were of my interest. So got some time to chat around with folks there.
In the end there was an excellent motivational session by Dr Rajdeep Manwani that was enjoyed by everyone in the audience. The key take away was that you yourself have to do something about the things that you think need to be fixed. Blaming others for mess up in your life isn’t going to help.
That was the end of the second day and the conference. We met everyone around and decided to leave. Our 9 PM flight to Delhi was delayed by 4 hours and we had plenty of time to reach the airport. So once again we headed to Paradise for dinner. We were having dinner and Kamran and Markus also reached there for checking out some Biryani. Finished our dinner, said good bye to them and left for the airport. Flight was delayed little more and finally reached home at 4 AM next morning. Long day !
Read Tim’s take on Day1 and Day2.