Last week I had the privilige to visit Bangladesh for Digital World 2015 in Dhaka. Digital World is a government-led week of IT conferences with more then 100 speakers, a huge exposition and tens of thousand visitors. IT in Bangladesh is growing with 20 to 30% each year and plays a majore role in the development of the country.

Protests

As you may know there have been a lot of violent protests lately, but fortunately I’ve only seen several peaceful protest and a lot of police and security. The traffic in Dhaka could easily get me killed even without the petrol bombs, but apparently our drivers have skills I don’t.

Blending in

On Sunday afternoon Hasin Hayder (Head of Ideas at ThemeBucket) took me and 2 other speakers into the city. Because of the protests we couldn’t see all of the attractions, but we did get to try some local food (snow ice FTW) and Hasin bought us a traditional dress to blend in:

Tutorial

On Monday I assisted Alessio Ricco in leading a one-day introduction to Titanium and Alloy for 15 students. Although we needed to workaround some internet and computer problems, we managed to take them through the process of creating a RSS reader app.

Professor Yunus

The tutorial was hosted by Grameen Solutions, founded by Professor Yunus who you might known for winning a Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microcredit. After the tutorial was finished we had the honour of meeting the professor to hear about his ideas on social business.

tiConf

Tuesday was tiConf-day. About 500 people attended this part of Digital World. A quick show hands learned that most of the audience had a background in web development, so my talk about Alloy ultimately came down to the message that using much of their existing knowledge they can now build native mobile apps as well!

You can find my slides on Speaker Deck and embedded on this page:

I really enjoyed my stay in Bangladesh and certainly hope to come back some time!