bookmark_borderBarCamp in Delhi

Hey Guys, BarCampDelhi3 has been announced. Better be there or you will miss out the best tech get together in town.

I have been involved with both the previous Delhi BarCamps. I have been a planner, speaker, front desk volunteer and a time keeper. I am sure it would be no different this time around. This is something I love about BarCamps. It’s a completely volunteer driven event. There is no organizer and there is no manager. Infact, everybody is the organizer and everybody is the manager. It is a very informal and flexible event.

It is a great platform for individuals, small companies and startups to get themselves or their product or service noticed. Decide on a topic you feel passionate about and if you can speak on it for 20-30 minutes, voila, you would be famous overnight.
If speaking on a topic is too much of an effort for you, blog/photolog/vlog the event, post about it on the wiki and use the tag barcampdelhi3. There are other ways also by which you can participate and help, read about it on the barcamp wiki.

If this will be your first barcamp, be warned, barcampers are a very opinionated group.
See the php vs ruby vs python vs java guys fight it out. Be ready for the Django vs Rails supermacy debate. Don’t miss the Opera vs IE battle. I prefer opera, after all they are sponsoring the drinks 😉
Is somebody from Microsoft reading this blog 🙂

The third barcamp at Delhi is being held this Saturday, 8th December 2007 at Impetus Technologies in Noida.

Details are on the wiki page here.

bookmark_borderBarcamp Delhi Again!

When the idea of a Barcamp was first mooted by Jon in February this year, we [Gaurav, Amit and moi] quicky lapped it up. But as the initial excitment of doing an “unconference” mellowed down, doubts started creeping in. We were not sure of what was in store for us.
Would there be enough people to join the “unconference”? Would we get enough sessions lined up? What would be the level of those sessions? etc. etc.

Eventually Barcamp Delhi proved to be a bigger success than any of us had imagined. Not only that, it proved to be the harbinger of a barcamp revolution of sorts in India.

And now the stage is set for the second round.

BarcampDelhi-2 will be held on this Saturday, 9th of December at Impetus Infotech, Noida.

For details visit the wiki page here

Thanks to Impetus for allowing us to use their offices, we were having a very tough time finding a suitable venue this time.

I have not yet finalized what I would speak on, but I am leaning towards something related to testing in Ruby on Rails.

Spread the word around and see you there!

p.s: An interesting bit, I came to know about barcamp from Rashmi at the Uzanto Open House. I always thought the name bar-camp came from the legendary foo and bar variables. Rashmi told us that the bar in barcamp is actually “Bay Area Rejects”, essentially those who were not invited to the foocamp.

bookmark_borderBarcamps covered by LivingDigital

When I, Amit and Gaurav met Binesh at Tekriti’s office in Gurgaon, for that informal chat about Barcamp Delhi, I had my doubts that LivingDigital was serious about publishing an article on Barcamps.

So I was really surprised when
I read on Amit’s blog
that there was an article in the June issue of LD which covered Barcamps.

Thanks Binesh for the article.

And again reading about BlogCamp on the main pages of HindustanTimes today, got me thinking about the kind of interest these “unconferences” are generating in the main media.

Though it would be much easier for anybody to organize the next barcamp or blogcamp or (whatever)camp. Will the crowd be the kind that these events have attracted so far.
I have met people who have attended BarCamp Delhi, and also the barcamps in the other Indian cities. A few of us also attended the first MoMoDelhi (mobile monday Delhi).
And most of us agree that BarcampDelhi, had the best crowd.

Could it be that as the word is spreading, the actual “Signal to Noise” ratio for these events is decreasing.

bookmark_borderBarCampDelhi: my experience

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.

bookmark_borderBarCampDelhi

Don’t wait to get invited to the FooCamp, signup for the barcamp today.

BarCamp, the open source version of Orielly’s FooCamp has finally arrived in Delhi.
All thanks to Jon, Amit and Gaurav for making it happen.

BarCampDelhi will be held on 4th March 2006 at Adobe’s campus in Noida.
The theme of BarCampDelhi will be “Next Generation Internet: Web 2.0, mobile computing, and other cool stuff”.
You can read more about it at the barcamp wiki.

I have volunteered for these sessions

  • Ruby on Rails : Rapid web application development
  • Simple Sharing Extensions : The two way RSS

If you would be interested in partnering with me on these, please drop me a mail.

I have been a TiE member for many years, it is a great community of entrepreneurs and I have learnt a lot from them.

Similarly, I hope the barcamp will help us create an NCR tech community.

So please spread the word around, this is a must attend event for all software enthusiasts in NCR.