Finally, I have managed to find some time to share my barcamp experience.
My Session
I made a presentation on “Agile web development with Ruby on Rails” and I know that it sucked big time. Being first up on stage, did not give me any chance to make changes, not that I had any intentions of changing the presentation .. Heheh ..just a lame alibi ;-).
I would have loved to do a demo, something like writing a blog-application in 15 minutes. The reason for not doing a demo was, that I do all my rails development on linux, my laptop, a five year old toshiba sattelite runs windows, and does not have wi-fi. So with ssh ruled out, i decided to do a ppt, with embedded ruby code to show.
And secondly, I did not time my presentation well, so inspite of skipping a couple of slides I was out of breath when i finished.
I would have loved to have a more interactive session instead of the stand and deliver model.
Other sessions
My views on some sessions that i attended.
Jon’s presentation on “Making AJAX applications faster” was great. He used methaphors from daily life to make the whole thing seem so simple.
Apart from the technical aspect, it was a great session to learn about “making an effective presentation” too.
Manish Jethani’s presentation on “Rich Internet Applications and Flex” was the geekiest presentation of the barcamp.
He created a live flex application that downloaded and ran popular videos from youtube. And he used vi on his windows laptop for live coding.
Does it get geekier than this. whatsayu?
Gaurav Bhatnagar made a very very insightful presentation on “Bootstrapping a software startup in 7 difficult steps”.
He shared his learnings and experiences on starting Tekriti Software . It’s always great to get it direct from the horse’s mouth.
Since I find myself, grappling with the same issues at vinsol , I learnt a lot from him.
After the camp
Some of us barcampers had a nice camp in a bar in Noida.
Made many new friends at the barcamp, found some great blogs to read, met some ruby enthusiasts. I can see a delhi geek/tech community in the making.
Thanks to Adobe for the venue and every barcamper for making the barcampDelhi the huge success that it was.
And a special thanks for Amit Ranjan for orchestrating the whole thing on the D-day.
Dude, your presentation on RoR was good! It’s among my favourites from that day.
It was nice hanging out with you guys. Do come to the Bangalore one if you get a chance. And thanks for doing the first BarCamp in Asia – you’ve set off some kind of a movement here 😉
I agree that technical sessions like yours would work better in a “workshop” mode – more interactive and hands on. None the less, I learnt a lot from your session on RoR!
Hi Manik,
Was upping my own blog (a more professional one) and linked yours there.. in either case BarCampDelhi is a reason enough to post here.. It was an amazing time, and I for one surely want to do this again.
Your presentation wasn’t as drab as you make it out to be, so take it easy on yourself. The first presenter always gets the bad end of the bargain, but you pulled out well. 🙂
Looking forward to more such interactions, and some collaboration in the near future!
PS: This could have been a post in itself. Sorry for a long one.
I feel better now 🙂 THanks!
I enjoyed your presentation too. Was simply kicked about the fact that Delhi geeks have discovered RoR! You did good. Plus you were lucky that yours was one of the few presentations before the audience was split into two rooms so you had TWICE as many people attending your talk compared to most others.