We had one of the Saturday MSCC meetup at Ebène Accelerator today. I reached Ebène around noon & met Ibraahim, Yunus and Sherven at InterMart while I was going to have lunch. Cool! We had lunch & discussed a couple of stuffs about next year’s plans.

At 13h00 we rushed to Ebène Accelerator. We walked to the conference room & wohooo… house full! We had to get chairs from the open-space.

####Who made it today?

Nayar Joolfoo, Kishan Bhugul, Shamsher Khudurun, Logan Velvindron, Wasima Damree, Avinash Mayaram, Ish Sookun, Nivedita Seewoosunkur, Ratna Chikhuri, Mirza Damree, Jesher Paupiah, Sherven Chinamoothoo, Yunus Aumeeruddy, Ibraahim Atchia, Jochen Kirstaetter, Nadim Bundhoo, Jes Marden, Ajay Ramjatan, Aslam, Irfaan Coonjah, Nushrath Mownah, Yannick Labonne & Jheengut Pritvi.

As it’s traditional when new folks come, each one of us made a quick introduction. Nayar’s intro was awesome, “I’m a noob and that’s it.” Jochen briefly described the activities & aim of MSCC. He gave an overview of next year’s Developers Conference. He also talked about the various benefits we have by registering on MSCC’s meetup.com page; it’s easier to approach companies showing our activities & members list and we benefit from sponsorship. MSCC members are entitled to discounts from O’Reilly and Pluralsight.

I shared the experience we had during Infotech & Linuxfest 2013. We’re receiving nice support from National Computer Board for open source promotion, especially targeted towards Small and Medium Enterprises. Folks from the UoM Computer Club were present as well and we shared feedback received so far.

uring the past week I came across a Python Developer, Jessica McKellar, who did an awesome presentation at PyCon US 2013. I read about her activities within the Boston Python User Group and how she inspires girls to get on with Python development. I invited her to be a guest speaker via video-call during one of our upcoming meetups, to which she agreed. In fact, she referred me to some PSF (Python Software Foundation) resources that could help us in next year’s Developers Conference. I announced the same to MSCC folks.

We had open discussions regarding Visual Basic or Python as development language in schools. It was great to have the opinion of so many. We also had a lengthy discussion about licenses. Irfaan tossed the topic on software piracy & its legal implications.

As we approached the end of meetup, Jochen announced that he had some goodies to distribute; a few Pluralsight coupons, 1-year Microsoft Office 365 subscription and 1 USB hub. Since we were many this time & goodies limited we were thinking how to distribute. To make it fun Ajay proposed we create a small program to randomize the names & pick one. Of course, in a developers meetup this could be a fun way. I proposed we shoot some development related questions. Well, we did both.

Kishan, Mirza, Shamsher & Pritvi got on with the coding fun and wrote rando.py.

MSCC is celebrating 6 months; to have 67 registered craftsmen & more than 20 attending a meetup is indeed a success. We hope to grow bigger, better & continue sharing the love for code!