DevCon in ICEAN Congress

The 2nd ICEAN Congress (University of Southeastern Philippines - Institute of Computing) was worth the break. Yes, break from the academic pressures of project completions (i know you guys-my colleagues know what are those ^_^). It is this ICEAN Congress that I can say I enjoyed attending the event.

The program started a little late because the event speakers were not able to arrive on time. Yet Information Technology and Computer Science students gathered at the university social hall are invigorated for the upcoming talks and activities for the day (not to mention the freebies!). Well as usual, there were distinguished speakers from various organizations in the IT industry, some of them had actually delivered talks from the previous congress. The first speaker who was Eric Su from PicLyf shared about certain points in getting jobs the awesome way. Basically it made students realize how significant it is to aim high and stand out to help build an awesome career in the future. The second speaker who was Milvene Mineses of Simply Gray Studio amazed the audience with the video presentation of wedding photography which focused on incorporating the effects of Adobe Photoshop to enhance photo shots. This impressed me since I aspired to have my own camera (how I wish it would be a DSLR one) and try my own shots someday. That involved a real big investment anyway. Before the morning session ended, the third speakers (they were two from the same company, Edmund Lee and Rojenn Ortiz from Offsourcing Inc.) discussed about important tips and strategies on how to write a resume that would stand out from the rest of the crowd when applying for jobs. I participated in the group collaborations of resume writing and I got a movie ticket as a freebie. Woohoo!

The best thing that made this ICEAN Congress memorable is that the DevCon people did not just send speakers from their team, but slipped in and made real DevCon a part of the event. That's enjoyment level-up! DevCon has its established sessions of lightning talks, birds of a feather, and hackathon. Mark Maglana perked up the audience with the intro to DevCon, explaining the organization's role and its offers to the community of developers. Keynote speaker Edmund Lee, president of Offsourcing Inc., once again awed the pipz with another discussion on the topic "After Graduation, What?" which is helpful especially for fourth year students and those who are doubtful of their careers after graduation, and the movie tickets as freebies of course! The succeeding discussions were lightning talks from CS evening student Veniza Joy Macaraeg who talked about IC students' experience in "IC on Tour" field trip/seminar, registered nurse-turned-animation graphics animator Tina Ortiz who not only dazzled the audience with her appeal but with her meaningful expression of turning a passion into a career, Jong Jison with his demonstration on Umbraco, an open source ASP.NET CMS, Eric Su once again from PicLyf who showed off the features of PicLyf and gave away T-shirts as freebies, and two more speakers who exhibited HTML 5/CSS 3 features and Windows Phone 7 awesome attibutes.

The next part was the Birds of a Feather (BoF) session side-by-side with Hackathon activity which were participated by groups of students. I was part of one team standing up for Google Chrome in the BoF which focused on Battle of Internet Browsers: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. It was actually a friendly debate and although I have prepared and searched some facts about the good side of Chrome, I was sort of not able to voice them out since my teammates were dashing their way to bring down the opponents. Nevertheless the audience had judged the winner - team Google Chrome. A DevCon T-shirt prize for me! Weeeh! All the pipz joined in the countdown to the hackathon, a timed coding activity for groups of students executing a programming or web activity with a desired output to be judged.

The event ended up with lots of cheers and picture takings. Everybody enjoyed the activities, not to mention the witty speakers who are very casual with speaking English, and the freebies and the raffle. Hopefully, the next ICEAN Congress will surpass the vigor and learnings that we, students, had on this event. And one more thing, I hope there would be real drinks and pizza for everyone to enjoy. ^_^

Free movie pass and T-shirt from DevCon (with autograph from Diane Suico,
Mark Maglana, and Randy S. Gamboa)- freebies that I got from participating.

I don't have all the pictures taken during the event yet. I guess I'll upload it later.  Thanks to my classmates for the photo shots at the social hall. And to Sir RSG. :-)