Spotlight on the #DCSW17 Developer Track
Registration is now open for DC Startup Week, taking place September 11–15. With a huge schedule of events across six tracks of programming, putting together your own schedule can be daunting! To help break it all down, we’ll be taking a deep dive into a track with the chair who puts it together, exploring the themes and topics they’re focused on this year, and hear what events they’re most excited to see.
This week we’re delving into the Developer Track with Organizing Chair and Track Captain Chida Sadayappan.
China Sadayappan is Founder and CEO of AI and Machine Learning Startup, Blitzar.io. Chida is a Technical Entrepreneur who built businesses around business intelligence, big data and Cloud technologies and successfully exited from them. He is a Technology Community Leader in the Washington DC area, organizing several technology and startup events including the yearly developer conference DevFest DC and organizer of the Google Developer Group Washington DC.
How did you get involved in DSCW?
In 2015, as Lead Organizer brought DC Startup Week to Washington DC to brew energy in the DC Startup Community.
Does the Developer Track have a theme or particular area of focus this year?
Developer track has few sessions this year, focusing on Machine Learning and Mobile themes this year. A session on Machine Learning on Friday will help the Startups, future business opportunities using Machine Learning.
What are the “can’t-miss” sessions in your track?
“How and Why We Deploy to 50 Servers 7 Times a Day” (September 9/12 at 04:00pm) — Crowdskout is a 3 year old engineering team that adopted continuous integration early on. Now with 15 engineers we deploy six code bases across 50 servers an average of seven times a day. We want to share how we accomplish this on AWS and Hivelocity hardware using tools like Ansible and Jenkins. And more importantly, why we practice CI, how it’s become a cornerstone of Crowdskout’s engineering culture, and the product ownership it instills.
“Success on Google Play — Store Listing Conversion Rate” (September 9/13 at 04:45pm) — Learn how to increase your installs by understanding your store visitors, creating a compelling store listing, running store listing experiments and analyzing/replying to reviews.
“Mixed Reality with HoloLens” (September 9/14 at 04:00pm) — Discover a new world of mixed reality with Microsoft HoloLens, the world’s first enterprise-ready standalone headset computer that allows you to interact with virtual objects in the real world. The transparent visor allows a user to walk around freely while using visual gaze, hand gestures, and voice commands. Learn about how your startup can benefit from this emerging technology that includes built-in spatial sound, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a custom holographic chip.
“Intro to Machine Learning and Opportunities For Startups” (September 9/15 at 08:30am) — In this session, Chida Sadayappan gives an overview of the emerging Machine Learning concepts and how one can leverage several Cloud ecosystems and their APIs to quickly build Business Apps.
What advice would you give someone who is attending DCSW for the first time?
Network. Network. Sessions are happening all over the town and use our sponsor Lyft to move around!
Any parting wisdom for someone attending (select track) Track sessions?
Look for future looking technologies in several of the sessions.
Learn more and register for the DC Startup Week celebration at http://www.dcstartupweek.org
