Sri Lanka’s first Code Camp Completed with Great Success

Tuesday, 6 September 2011 00:34 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The Colombo Code Camp, Sri Lanka’s very first code camp, was held with great success in Colombo recently. The event brought together some of the best IT geeks in Sri Lanka in a highly interactive and informative programme facilitated by Ragnar Harper, one of the world’s most renowned architects on Microsoft based technologies.

Colombo Code Camp (CCC - www.colombocodecamp.com) is an independent community of software developers, driven to improve competency of Sri Lankan software developers. Founded by dedicated professionals in the local IT industry, CCC is focused on improving technology competencies of Sri Lankan developers.

CCC reached out to IT professionals through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn which is the world’s largest professional network with over 100 million members. CCC was subsequently recognized as the most popular conference worldwide in its debut event by LinkedIn, due to the large number of ‘geeks’ who applied to participate in the programme. Fifty out of the 400 applicants were selected to participate in this event free-of-charge while over 300 others were able to participate online since the programme was live-streamed.

Ragnar, one of Microsoft’s MVP (Most Valuable Professionals) discussed state-of-the-art technologies such as HTML5, Microsoft Kinect, Microsoft Surface etc., and the ways in which these technologies could be used to enhance lives and bring people closer together in spite of geographical separation, under the theme of the event, ‘User Interaction Tools for Next Generation Software’.

For the last 15 years, Ragnar has been focusing on Enterprise Architecture and has helped some of Europe's largest corporations to deliver enterprise solutions to their markets. “When I learnt that Colombo Code Camp was going to happen, I was really excited. This would become my first trip to Sri Lanka, even though I have worked with people from Sri Lanka in projects for years’, said Ragnar. “I am a huge believer of communities and how communities can make great things happen. For many reasons I think people should be a part of a community - but the important thing is that it just makes you better in every way. Sharing knowledge with other people, will take your own knowledge to a new dimension. So, I was really looking forward to being a part of getting Colombo Code Camp to happen for the very first time.”

The event concluded with Ragnar awarding a Kinect XBOX 360 for the overall best contributor – Aneef Fashir, Group Manager of Software Engineering at Assette, as well as competency tokens for the winners of team competitions. After the event, one participant posted on twitter commenting, “It is truly an eye opener to change the way we look at the whole thing” while another posted, “Thanks CCC for the great insight in to the future”.

Eurocenter DDC was the main sponsor of the event while Microsoft Sri Lanka and Dialog Telekom were co-sponsors.