Last week was fun – a lot of people were in town! It started Tuesday afternoon with my meeting Vinod on 100 ft Road in Indiranagar for a very-early-in-the-day beer next to his hotel while we waited for Erica and Lobo to get in from Delhi. Eventually we figured out that they were booked at a different hotel, so I headed home but rejoined them at 6pm at Concu. (More precisely, we met at Third Wave but it was way too loud so we walked down the street)… by this time there were seven of us but Concu had plenty of space.

We had initially booked a table for dinner at Podi and Spice, but after some cross-communication we cancelled that reservation and walked over to Burma Burma… where we were told the wait would be 45 minutes. Nobody wanted to walk back to BIC so we crossed the street and got a table for 10 at the Pizza Bakery. It was our first time meeting our newest colleague Sangeeta in person, and my first time meeting Tejas since he started at T4D.

After dinner everyone went home or back to their hotels. and Nair discovered that 100 ft Rd in Koramangala isn’t 100 ft Rd in Indiranagar.

The next morning Nair and I met at Paper and Pie to hammer out some items from our current sprint, and were joined soon after by Erica, Lobo, Rajeev, and Vinod. Vinod was headed back to Chennai that evening so when he left we said goodbye, but everyone else was staying for the OASIS conference on Thursday.

Thursday we started early! Nair messaged me saying that setup started at 8, but I needed to eat first so I didn’t get to BIC until 8:45. Arvind had gotten back into town the night before, and after the three of us connected our laptops to the television screens and set our videos on repeat, we headed out to Lavonne for coffee.

By the time we got back people had started showing up… the Tech4Dev team as well as other people we knew. Lots of catching-up was happening and the mood was upbeat! Then we all filtered into the auditorium for the first two blocks – a keynote followed by a panel discussion. After that I was part of a session in one of the smaller meeting rooms where I was very pleased to see two former coworkers in the audience. The discussion went well and each panelist had questions from audience members afterwards, until the organisers gently shooed us out to make room for the next talk.

I spent the rest of the day hanging around our booth, talking to whoever came by, telling them about Dalgo and whether or not it was appropriate for them. I finally got to hand out the business cards which were printed for me back in … April? May? I had brought an entire box and just left a stack on our table for people to pick up.

By 4:30pm my throat was tired from all the talking, so I packed up and headed home. It was a great week and I’m looking forward to the next big team gathering in Cochin next month, where Vikram has promised us a gym AND a swimming pool.

Till then

Rohit