Barcamp fever is back in Pune with rainy welcome from Rain Gods. After spending last week doing preparations for Barcamp Pune event at my current organization, Persistent Systems, I was really hoping to witness a good un-conference with the help of lots of meaningful discussions and sessions. And now after Barcamp is over, when I look back at those precious 8 hours, boy! I think there couldn't have been a better way to spend a saturday.
Being an organizer, I sure was lucky enough to attend as close to 5 sessions(summing up the half sessions that I had attended).
Session which requires a special mention and the one which enlightened me the most was Setting up a global technology company by http://techjuris.com. Rohas(Lawyer by profession), walked everyone through how easy it was for an Indian to setup a company remotely in USA, UK and Singapore sitting here in India. I will write a separate post about points which Rohas had put forward in favor of opening companies in USA/UK /Singapore rather than India.
TVGuide.in session by Rakesh Raju of http://codewalla.com/ included introduction to TVGuide.in and requirements gathering from audience. Really a very good place to gather requirements.
About TVGuide.in, its a TV programs schedule service built for India, it provides following features at the moment,
1. List of about 100 channels, data being fed from respective channels websites, for e.g. Star channels from Star TV network., that solves the problems of authenticity of data!
2. Search for particular programs across various categories.
Some of the features that Rakesh mentioned he is thinking of were include watching trailors, or probably full programs on TVGuide.in(but thats something which will take another 5 years in India).
Audience suggested that a community can be built around this application where users can submit reviews about programs, add other users as friends and see what they are interested in.
My second session( first half session) of the day was Intoduction to Microsoft SilverLight by Aditya Thatte. I came in about 15 minutes late and saw Aditya demoeing Expression Blend, tool for developers to build silverlight enabled interfaces.
Then it was turn for session on much-talked about Facebook platform and its integration with Ruby on Rails by Abhijit Gadgil, http://oltsm.blogspot.com., more on this session and discussions with Abhijit in a separate post.
Before lunch I caught up with Akshay Surve, whom I know since Pune Rails Hackathon days. he told me that he was there to take interviews today and release them as podcasts. good stuff, hope to hear those interviews soon.
I talked to Swanand about his Google Summer of Code project of developing an ETL tool in Ruby. he explained me about various features of his tool, primarily,
a. Profiling of data,
b. multiple data sources( flat files, postgres, mysql)
c. DSL for developers and rake task for specifying extract operations(sources and filtering).
By the time I joined "Developing a Firefox plugin" by Vinod Kulkarni, he was almost done with explaining the various steps in developing a plugin to firefox by using XUL. This regret coming in late, since I have developing firefox plugin in my wish list.
To end the day for me(there was one more session remaining but I opted for networking at barcamp), it was Open Source Education" by Freeman Murray. Freeman started with mention of blog entry of Riya CEO Munjal shah where he says how costs of hiring good developers in India are getting comparable to US.
Freeman's response was to spread the awareness of Open source education, make it reach rural areas so that we have more self-skilled people. he mentioned about his efforts with Digital Study Hall project to create video courseware materials in a wide range of technical subjects and making them available to wider audience.
Oh yes not to forget, Rohit announced about Clubhack ,the first hackers hangout of India, event that is being planned for the month of December.
Last but not the least, A big thanks to all the sponsors, volunteers,speakers and ofcourse all the attendees of the event to make this event successful.
See you at next barcamp.
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