Bangalore Barcamp 4: Day1

Saturday
05:00 am: Woke up, got ready and headed towards Pune airport.
08:45 am: Onboard, thinking about the activities, sessions lying ahead in the day.
10:20 am: I am on cloud no. 9 and flight has started descending.(thinking, how awesome it would be to see these clouds around when I wake up everyday.)
11:15 am: Already thrilled by beautiful weather of Bangalore and now I see even more beautiful campus of IIM bangalore.
11:30 am: Registration done, looking at schedules and confirming about sessions in Ruby collective which are lined from 03:00 pm today. I meet my friend Angrez and then we decide to sit in lawn and discuss about Rails and Ruby(FireWatir). we talk about how beautiful Ruby is and explain principles of Rails to Prema and Angrez.

11:45: Met Amit who is talking about code Jam and hacking night. Introduce him and others to clubhack event being organized for the month of December in Pune.

12:30 pm: Starving.. decided to get a bite at CCD.. ate costliest samosa in my life, 16 bucks!!! its about to be lunch time in another hour an hour.

01:00 pm: wandering around in IIM campus, seeing IIM students studying in the shade of trees.. head towards canteen where lunch is being served..had good lunch and now gearing up to participate in Ruby sessions.

02:00 pm: Attend a session on tips for investors which I think was quite introductory and boring.

03:00 pm: Angrez kick offs Ruby collective by a session on Firewatir generator. he talks about how he has mentored a Google Summer of Code project which is about using TestGen4Web addon to Firefox which records actions performed by user on Firefox browser, to generate a FireWatir script. Audience starts comparing FireWatir to Selenium and are confused when to use which tool.

04:00 pm: Vivek starts his talk titled Deploying Rails applications in which he covers
a. Web Servers: Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd: Nginx becoming the defacto becuase of its low memory footprint and ability to have weighted load balancing.
b. Application Server: brief intro to Mongrel
c. Rails hosting: Shared(unsuitable for Rails 1.2+), VPS and Dedicated hosting. VPS is the best option considering the cost effectiveness and control a user has.
d. Monitoring Rails application: Using Monit to monitor Rails apps.
e. Cron jobs: for clearing stale sessions, database maintenance, clearing logs.
Wonderful session!
Here is link to the presentation

05:30: pm: Call it a day and head towards MG Road and Brigade Road which has been suggested by many banglorians.

Coverage for Day-2 in next post.