e27 founders drinks, Feb. 2013

Hello there various community peoples,

It's a week on from my last talk/demo so I figured it'd be a good time to blog up about it as a break from some EAP hacking. Last Thursday, 21st Feb, we were invited to run a half-hour presentation spot at Singapore's e27 founders drinks for the month.

e27 is a media company that is trying to encourage tech start-ups around Asia. In addition to this monthly founders' drinks community event, they report relevant start-up news along with organising an annual conference. This month, since Red Hat were sponsoring the day, I got an opportunity to head out and talk about using JBoss Dev Studio (JBDS) on OpenShift. I wasn't the only person talking to the audience as there was a panel of local start-up CTO's giving a description of their experiences.

The panel

My talk was pretty fun to do - I wound up running the same demo that I did at Republic Polytechnic but change what I actually spoke about to make it relevant towards entrepreneurs. This time, the Gods of WiFi did smile upon me and mean that I didn't have to revert to tethering my iPhone - I guess prayers do actually help! Comments afterwards along the lines of: "wow you were really patient through that demo" are always amusing to hear.

It's pretty important that people realise that a tool like OpenShift can really help with getting their ideas live and 'in the real world'. I do have a feeling that some people did get that message and were curious about OpenShift. I was pretty happy that people were willing to talk and exchange name-cards at the end of the show, their interest can be what drives a new local developer community. Being an entrepreneur can be dangerous business but it can be really rewarding, and I take my hat off to these people giving it a shot.

Some very keen Red Hat people in the background looking on.

Thanks go to Alan Ho and Lynn Tan who are part of our local Marketing crew who helped with setting things up. I'm really thankful for the trial runs with them and extra pointers I received to help make what I said relevant for the audience. They sorted out DVD's to be distributed to the audience which had an installer of JBDS on it along with this video from a nice man named Marius. Thanks should also go to e27 for getting people to the venue and making sure that we had a sizable audience of about 100 people.

The venue? Shuffle at Clarke Quay in Singapore. Cold Kronenbourg, good pizza and a swanky location. Pretty good spot to spend a Thursday evening if you ask me!

I couldn't help but add this one in

Summing up - once again it was a pretty fun experience. There were always going to be quite a few people just there for the free food and drink but thankfully they were sat away at the back of the room. I know for a fact that the Red Hat crew present enjoyed themselves and did manage to gain some useful insight from speaking with the local entrepreneurs.

Thanks for listening all!