Recently, on August 25 and 26, I attended as a speaker on a Cells on Camp event (a preview of another Microsoft event, Code Camp) given in Santiago del Estero (Argentina), my home town. I presented about IIS7: Interoperability with PHP.

Presenting at cells on camp

Playing around with applicationhost.config

It is always special to participate on any event, but I have to say that visiting back my home town (I don’t do it all that often) and my University it has another type of feeling. My professional life began with those events and activities: I belong (now as a remote member) to a study group called GENTI (Information Technologies Study Group); we started it at October/November of 2005 with a group of students and professors of the University, together with Alejandro Ponicke (Microsoft’s South Cone IT Evangelist) as a mentor. We began learning everything from scratch, we didn’t have much experience or knowledge but we sure knew what we wanted and we went after it.

GENTI crew back in 2006

On our first public event (May 2006) everything went perfect; the auditorium was too small for all the people that attended (~ 350 on the first conference and with 300 seats available). Alejandro Ponicke supported us with a few conferences; I also participated as a speaker. And I met a great friend of mine: Johnny Halife.

Code Camp 2007: Memories with Johnny Halife

So, whenever these types of academic events appears, no matter what technologies are involved, I think of them as great opportunities for any young students and the whole community behind it. That’s the case for my own University and my town; it always had this lack of technological events, that do not contribute on making their own future professionals to be updated with all the constant technological advances.

Making this small contribution with a conference in Santiago del Estero, makes me real proud of all of the work and ideals we had, and still have, when we started with GENTI. I really hope that those types of events start being traditional and appears really often to all the community.

On the meanwhile, I’ll start preparing my next conference at Code Camp 2008.

We’ll see each other then.

Cheers!