“I feel stupid! Really.” I said to Sharique multiple times at Hyderabad Airport when he made me realise my stupid mathematical miscalculation. Till then, I have been telling everyone that we have 2 days leisure and 3 days training and the training starts on 4th and ends on 7th, 3 (7-4) days, right? Wrong. How am I employed? 🤣

Jokes apart. As much as I felt ashamed of this, it also felt good that we had one extra day in the UAE! So, here is an account from each of those days.

Day 0

Sharique and I had chosen a middle ground to fly to Dubai: Hyderabad. He flew from Mumbai and I from Jagdalpur. It turned out to be a really good decision for two reasons: Hyderabad International Airport was way less busy compared to what I experienced at Mumbai Airport during Africa visit and I had to take one less flight 😆

We had a lot of time before the departure, so we roamed around the Airport and thanks to our over estimation of time, were the last to get on the plane.

Fast forward a few hours, here is a view from the window before landing at Dubai International Airport:

The roads look like LED strips, don’t they? 🤩

After a long line at immigration checks, we were in a metro inside the airport, yup they have a freaking metro line as part of the airport to travel between terminals and gates!

We fell asleep watching the well lit skyscrapers from our hotel room window.

Day 1

After a good night’s sleep we were ready to explore Dubai. We decided to leave early and walk around the streets and have breakfast.

We also got our metro cards from the nearest metro station (Max, our favourite metro station now 🤣).

Binson was at our hotel to pick us up at 9AM. First we visited the Penieltech office, our partners and met half the team (since it was a Saturday):

After a good discussion on their business and why they have chosen ERPNext services as a vertical, we (Sharique, Binson and I) left for Jebel Jais Mountains. It is a spectacular mountain peak in Ras Al-Khaimah. People were engaged in activities like camping, bike riding and zip-lining!

We got out of the car at the peek, took some pictures and had to rush back into the car because it was very cold out there:

While on the way to Jebel Jais, Binson had already booked a Desert Safari for the three of us. After some dune bashing (google it up 😉) in the desert, we were headed for Dinner in the city. When we reached our hotel, Shariq and I recollected the most amazing moments, I shared a post on LinkedIn and we were on the way to the world of dreams.

Day 2

After a very full breakfast, we went on a long drive around Palm Jumeirah with Binson:

He dropped us near the Dubai Frame, where we did some shopping and took quite a few pictures with this beauty:

The best thing we did on Day 1 was to get a metro (Nol) card and I highly recommend it, metro travel is very efficient in Dubai. We used the same to get to the very famous Dubai Mall & Burj Khalifa! What a marvel of engineering. Honestly, I was not able to see the top of it from the ground without bending my neck 😆

After going to the top (148th floor) of Burj Khalifa and enjoying the Dubai night view, we were on our way back to the hotel.

Day 3

Unlike the other 2 days, we already had plans for this day: Abu Dhabi. But before that, we did a comprehensive Frappeverse demo session at Penieltech office. Shariq gave a sneak peek of the new Frappe CRM (which is now officially launched btw!) and I showed a few more Frappeverse apps.

We got so into the flow that we lost track of time and got late for our trip to Abu Dhabi. But we decided to go anyways since we won’t get a chance again because the training was going to start the next day. Binson was kind enough to ask one of his colleagues to drop us to the bus stand.

After some exploration, we figured we can use the same metro card (nol strikes back 🤣) for the bus to reach Abu Dhabi. Behind the scenes, I was in touch with Rizwan from Uniject General Trading, our very new partners in the UAE. He was also going to join us for the boot camp the next day.

After more than two hours of a smooth bus ride and a few short naps, we got out at Abu Dhabi bus station and headed for lunch nearby. While we were waiting for our order, Rizwan was here to pick us up, for his office. While having lunch, we had a nice chat on how he grew up in Abu Dhabi, went back to India for some years and now is back here to start a new IT services vertical (based on ERPNext) at his brother-in-law’s firm.

At the office, after having a great discussion around FOSS, AI and Frappe’s interesting culture with Shinoj (Director) and Rizwan (right of Shariq), we left for Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. The sun was down and the whole city was filled with colourful lights from a range of shops and buildings. They dropped us at the grand mosque after a tasty Shawarma at Zahrat Lebnan (meaning lebanese flower).

As the name suggests, the Mosque is really grand! Shariq and I spent some time at the mosque, took a lot of pictures and then left for Dubai.

Day 4 (Training Begins)

The day has come for the thing we were actually in the UAE for 😆

The Frappe Framework Bootcamp was about to start in a few hours and we were excited for it. Umair had invited a few partners for a short meet-up and was also going to meet us at the venue.

We reached the training venue an hour earlier for setting things up. While waiting for entering our names in the record at the building entrance, we met Tinashe, who was here from all the way to South Africa for the bootcamp! We together took the elevator for our training room. The venue, Italiacamp at WTC, was just beautiful and had a really nice vibe. Shukoor and Ashiq from NextIT team (our venue sponsors) were already here.

One by one attendees starting joining in as we were setting up our equipments for recording the training sessions. We had attendees from Pakistan, Oman, South Africa, Kenya (I had already met Patrick during Kenya visit), Saudi Arabia and more. So truly a world-class!

Recording Horrors

A 64GB memory card. A vlogging camera. Low on disk space MacBooks. What could go wrong?

We quickly realised the camera can’t store the whole day of recording, so Shariq has to transfer the recordings to our computers at every break. And since our computers also didn’t have much space, we had to upload them to the cloud too 😭! Moral of the story for me: buy and carry an external SSD.

The training went smooth and we were done for the day before 5PM.

Shariq and I decided to take a tour of Gold Souk area (which my sister had suggested to visit) by metro.

A shop keeper at Gold Souk recommended a kebab place named Al Ustaad for dinner and we took his word for it. It was definitely the best kebabs I have ever had in my life:

And no, I am not upset or angry in the above pic 😆

We walked around for sometime and then were headed back to our hotel. But it wasn’t time to sleep yet since we still had to empty our SSDs and a memory card. Also, I was having a chat with someone from the KSA for a special meeting the next day 😉

Day 5

Following the same routine as the day before, we went for the training. But there was one thing different this time and I think it made a lot of difference in terms of networking and bonding among attendees: sandwiches and juices for everyone! We had lunch together, had informal chats and it was a vibe. Thanks NextIT team for arranging the same!

This day, we decided to visit Dubai’s popular Miracle Garden. Tinashe and Patrick joined us. Hundreds of thousands of flowers and plants in a desert land, what an amazing sight it was:

After watching the sun set here, we took an uber to the nearest metro station. But there was a twist in the story here.

The crowd was rushing in the opposite direction of the trains! What was happening? Upon investigation, we found that Dubai Metro was down. I think it was a very rare sight. This was confirmed by Shukoor bhai the next day: “I haven’t seen this in my 11 year here, you are lucky ...”, “lucky or unlucky” I chuckled. 😆

Back to present: the Uber prices sky rocketed as everyone who got out of the metro was trying to book one. We decided to walk in the direction of the city.

Remember I told you about a special meeting? It was going to happen at 8PM and it was already time. The meeting was with Ali, from solutions by 42. He had emailed me a while back when he saw I was going to be in Dubai. I pinged him to explain the situation and then he insisted on picking us up in his car, which he came driving from Dammam, KSA!

He picked us up and we had dinner together:

After dinner and dropping Tinashe and Patrick near their stay, we left for Satwa, the area Shariq and I were staying at. Ali was very excited to show us the stuff they have built on Frappe Framework and the collaboration with the KSA government, and so were we. We first sat at a park bench near our hotel and Ali started with discussing what their team is upto. The park closed and we moved our discussion to the hotel lobby. The cycle of demo and amazement continued till 2AM!

I will try to summarise the projects in a paragraph or two (this could well be a separate blog post of its own). They have a dedicated team for Frappe projects named “Stride” and work on big government projects. They are very UI/UX savvy and I could see that in their work:

They built a platform for a Charity project of the government, from what I understood is a micro-finance loan service with 0% interest. The Frappe based system is processing ~SAR 9M worth of transactions per day! We could see the loan repayments appear in real time when Ali opened the list view!

It got even more interesting when he showed us a mobile game that is backed by Frappe Framework:

It is always amazing to see Framework used in the wild and the power of open source, where even the builders of the software don’t know what beautiful and impactful stuff their tool is being used to do! Thanks for the dinner and showing us the amazing work you and your team are doing with Frappe, Ali.

Day 6

Since, we were to leave for our Airport directly from the venue, we had to wake up early and prepare for checkout. We had a very tasty breakfast at a nearby Pakistani restaurant and left for the venue:

This day the training ran till after hours and Shukoor bhai had arranged a ride to the Airport. Rizwan also accompanied us to the Airport. We all had dinner and special chai on the way.

Shariq and I waited for boarding as we recollected what an unbelievable time we had in the UAE.

Epilog

The journey of a lifetime comes to an end. I am already missing the time I spent in the UAE. Off to more such adventures!

Special thanks to Binson, Rizwan, and Shukoor for the amazing hospitality and making us feel right at home. Also thanks to everyone who joined us for the bootcamp. Hope to be back some day!

BTW The complete bootcamp training is now available on Frappe School for everyone as a course here.