A Forum for Aspiring Computer Engineers (FACE), in collaboration with StudyOwl, conducted a Developer Weekend on Chatbots and Progressive Web Apps on March 4- 5, 2017.

Developer Weekend was a community driven two day event Initiative by FACE (Forum for Aspiring Computer Engineers), Computer Science Department Bangalore Campus, and was well supported by Amrita TBI – Technology Business Incubator and StudyOwl. The motto of Developer Weekend was to ‘focus on new and trending technologies to utilize the weekend to master the technologies learnt’. Developer Weekend gave students the opportunity to interact with and gain insights from industry experts from various technical backgrounds.

On the first day of Developer Weekend, the large group was initially greeted by the secretary of FACE, Mr.Sanket M. Bhat (III year, CSE). Mr. Prashanth Reddy from StudyOwl gave a brief introduction to the workshop. Next, Mr. Sohan Maheshwar from Gupshup – Technology Pvt.Ltd, one of the world’s largest smart messaging platforms, conducted a half day training session on chat bots. His session offered a hands-on bot experience. The session also helped the students in learning static and dynamic types of responses of a chat bot using a float bot model and Gupshup IDE. The platform Gupshup was used to create Bots. 

Mr. Kesavan from De Circ (Amrita TBI Incubatee), gave a demo on the Amazon Echo device. In the afternoon session, a Bot-Hackathon (Botathon) was conducted and the attendees demonstrated the bot that they had built. Some of interesting bots built during hackathon were Amrita Events and Suicide Help Line. The attendees learned a lot about Chatbots as a user friendly tool to help people find information.

The second day’s session was very interactive and engrossed the attendees an with interesting introduction to JavaScript by Mr. Madhu Kiran, an executive member of FACE. Mr. Prashanth from StudyOwl explained the dire need to understand the fast growing technology, Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience. He also traced the fundamentals of web server and scripting codes of PWA. Progressive Web Apps bring features expected from native apps to the mobile browser experience in a way that uses standards-based technologies and runs in a secure container accessible to anyone on the web. 

​The duo together shed light on the various applications and advancements made by this modern technology. The session ended with a positive note of the declaration of the winners of the Botathon who showcased an unparalleled display of creativity and ideas. The event came to an end with a Q&A session and a lot of effective knowledge on the aspects related to the coding.