Seminar at St. Joseph's College of Engineering - quite an experience!

After spending the last 3 months on a hectic work schedule (corporate training sessions and few consulting contracts), I managed to take a break to give a guest lecture at St. Joseph's College of Engineering today.

I firstly thank Mr. Sathish for making the right move in getting the whole event organized at his college campus. I also thank Mr. Manoj, Mr. Saravanan, and the entire staff of the I.T. department for their firm support.

While the topic for the seminar/guest lecture (whatever people call it) was about Linux, I spent three hours taking the participants on a whirl-wind tour on various aspects of Free Software, UNIX methodologies, Linux distributions, programming concepts, perils of proprietary software and vendor lock-in, features and benefits of Linux. The first half of the session (which involved history and terminologies) would have bored a couple of participants. The second half of the session, however caught many participant's attention as I performed a few 'magical' gimmicks on Linux, showing off the power of the Linux shell and a couple of simple commands. Perhaps they were impressed overall.

And yes, as always, I missed out a lot on what I had thought to cover, due to time and resource constraints. But I hope the participants enjoyed the session. Though I could not get first-hand feedback about the session, I felt overjoyed when Sathish called me back this evening to say that a lot of his friends who attended the session were impressed, motivated and have also decided to look forward to learn more about Linux and Free Software to strengthen their career.

Overall, it was quite an impression for the participants, while it was quite an experience to me.