Sandeep Jahagirdar :: Dotman's Story: May 2007

19th May 2007
SUN Technology Summit
Taj West End, Bangalore

5^th Of May 2007, On a cloudy Saturday Morning I received a mail from Sercon, a known business events organizing company. At first, thought might be a spam but realized that it was an invitation from SUN Microsytems to attend Sun Technology Summit 2007.

WoW! I couldn’t wait anymore to know the sessions of the event. Sun’s vision on AJAX and Web 2.0 Framework, Java SE features, Web Services & SOA, Dtrace, ZFS & Open Solaris’s Evolution….. and few more

On 15^th May I got confirmation mail and invitation ID to attend the grand event on 19^th May @ Taj West End hotel. Event was from 9 AM to 4 PM. On 19^th after dropping an email to my Manager & Team Lead that I will be leaving soon from office to attend an event, I left at about 12:30 to attend the happening event of the year.

When I reached, I was told by the lady at the reception that event has been cut down to 2:00 PM and it’s already 12:45. Damn! “Look lady, I have been invited by the manager @ SUN and I have confirmed that I can attend this at any time since I had other prioritized work. You may confirm with him…..”

Ok Ok sir, sorry for any inconvenience, please sign here….. and here is your badge & the event catalogue. (Heheh, the trick worked).

There were two session halls. I decided to attend the session on "Dtrace", in hall 1 than the session on "Java persistence API" in hall 2, as I had nothing to do with API’s. I entered the hall, the session was almost half done. There were more than 250 people in the hall. Some seems to be bugged up, some were sleepy, some were talking on the phone to their friends sitting in the other hall to know what’s cooking there but most of them were seriously involved in the session. Somehow, I managed to get a seat in the 4^th row. By the way did I tell you that “DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.” I enjoyed this session not only because a beautiful lady from HCL was sitting next to me but the presenter explained very well the in n out of DTrace.

Before going to hall 2, I attend the session on “ZFS- The last word on FileSystems”. ZFS stands for Zetta File System is world’s first 128 bit filesystem and has lot of good features . Then I moved for the session on “OpenSolaris: A Software Evolution”, by a SUN developer from India itself. Phew!

With that all sessions got over, and the best part of the event: a free “Lunch in Taj”. One can only dream of it… The food was damn tasty, I never had such a heavy, tasty & expensive lunch before. There were N number of stalls of salads, juices, rotis, curry, veg-non veg, chats and much more…. All people ate like as if they were hungry since ages. Typical Indians :0).

After finishing the lunch I was heading towards the parking zone, with office & pending tasks in my mind. But while coming back, I noticed few people were standing in a circular way surrounding one tall person. Out of curiosity I went near by to have a closer look…

Couldn’t believe….., it was him. “Scott McNealy – Co-founder & Chairman of Sun Microsystems”. WaaaW! Man, I just thought I might see him today from a long distance, but this much close. Dream come true ;0)

I decided to take his autograph & have a little conversation. As soon as the other delegates left & decided to pitch in…

Sandeep: Hello Sir, I am Sandeep.
McNealy: Hello Young man.
Sandeep: Sessions were very useful. Thanks!
McNealy: Thank you.
Sandeep: Can I have your autograph please?
McNealy: Oh Sure, by all means.
(He opened his wallet & took his business card to sign on it.)
“There you go….”
Sandeep: Thank you, would you mind a photograph……..
McNealy: Why not? ….
Sandeep: Great!

(I asked help of a person passing by. "Hi, can u please take a picture of mine n McNealy?" )

McNealy: OK…
Sandeep: By the way I work for DELL
McNealy: Oh! That’s great, what do you do?
Sandeep: I belong to Dell eCommerece division.
McNealy: Very Interesting. All the best. Need to go now, few more meetings.
Sandeep: Sure, thanks again. Have a nice day.
McNealy: Yup. You too.

Picture: (McNealy's Business card with Sign)

During that moment I felt like a senior board of director meeting McNealy to decide some business strategy. So simple and smiley pal. Great experience. But, but but………, when I looked into the picture. “DAMN! it’s little blurry due to hand shake while clicking”. Oops! Literally felt like punching that guy. Anyways can’t do that, so decided to go back to the office with the OpenSolaris DVD and NetBeans CD in hand.