Hasgeek, and their ramblings to support exorbitant ticket rates

Hasgeek has announced a javascript workshop as part of their annual javascript convention in India, jsfoo. Below is the screenshot from the blog entry announcing the workshop.

Yup, the cost of an entry ticket to this nodebots workshop is INR 15000/- . Yes. Apparently, only the rich can attend hasgeek's workshops, even if they are based on free/open source technology.

Look at other workshops too:

 

And then, three days later they post a supporting entry on their blog about why the rates for their conventions and workshops are exorbitantly priced.

Scolling down their various entries, it can be seen that in the past, they have actually written a five-part-miniseries about their ridiculous ticket pricing.

This just goes on to confirm that hasgeek is more of  a pr company than company trying to imbibe hacker-culture in India.

The only hasgeek workshop I attended was Droidcon-2013. I attended the beginner level workshop, because on the Android platform, I was a beginner. Having worked in enterprise software all my career, I was craving for a bit of coding again, to hit the compile button and create magic again, like in my school/college days. The beginners workshop was priced at a reasonable 1k INR only.

And…it was worth it. The 2 day workshop was instructed by these exceptional speakers:
                  

Now I must say that not all of the topics in the agenda was covered. Due to the unique mix and match of the participants at various experience levels, a few things had to be skipped to keep time. But the speakers did a fantastic job of covering maximum area among themselves. They invested quality time in properly sharing their wealth of information with us, the participants, and more than happy and patient to take questions. By tea-break on the first day, there were phones going buzz and blink in the room running cool new apps developed by newbie developers themselves !

I was intrigued. For a long time I had been out of touch with open source languages, I was trying to find a way back in, to at least code in my little freetime, if not part of my daily office regime. Workshops and conventions like these are exactly what people like me wanted, simple and cost effective events which was well within the reach of coders, but which delivered as promised. I was delighted, and determined to return to another hasgeek workshop soon. But I could never.

Well one reason was that I hardly had the time. But the real reason was that all the workshops and conventions were priced exorbitantly high. For a 6 hour workshop on a topic of free technology, I could not justify shelling out many thousands of rupees.

And now things have come to a point were only the filthily rich can afford to participate and share their knowledge on free software.

Wakeup , hasgeek. No amount of follow up posts on your blog can justify the humungous amounts you are charging for your events. Not cool.

PS:

And now I am trying to watch the sucking jfsoo livestream on youtube.