Monday, March 06, 2006

My experience at Barcamp Delhi

I spent all of Saturday this past weekend at BarCamp Delhi (a nice coincidence that it was scheduled while I am here in India for a wedding!)

My summary of Barcamp Delhi:

* I love Delhi (lived here for five years during middle school and high school) and while I've spent a lot of time here, I've never been around the kind of smart, motivated and talented technologists that I spent time with on Saturday. I expect great things from these people!

* Meeting the folks that I did really hit home what a small technology world we live in and how much smaller it is thanks to blogs. It was a bit surreal (Scoble has described the same sentiment before) to be sitting in Adobe's office in NOIDA and hearing folks in the audience dissect and discuss technologies like Google News, gada.be, Windows Live and Gmail.

* Adobe's office in Delhi is really nice -- a big thanks to them for giving us their conference rooms, for feeding us lunch, and last, but certainly not least, for the fast and free wi-fi. And while I'm at it, big thanks also goes to the folks that catalyzed and planned the event: Gaurav, Jonathan Boutelle, Manik Juneja, and Amit Ranjan.

* Manish talked about microformats as a solution for knowledge management in organizations and in this context, he had a screenshot of a microformats plug-in for wordpress. I've read about microformats and understand what they are all about, but seeing it integrated into a blog publishing platform wasn't something I had seen before and it was very cool. Manish's is a great speaker, but I felt the content was a bit jargony and maybe too academic in places -- I could tell from the Q&A that Manish gets this stuff so my only criticism here is that IMO he should have communicated it in clearer simpler language. Anyways, I'm still not sure about how structured user-generated content is going to come into existence, but microformats deployed through blog publishing platforms seem like one viable approach. There are other approaches like Edgeio and Google Base.

* Want to befriend an Indian engineer / technologist? Buy him a beer. In particular, buy him a Foster's. :-)

* Gaurav (one of the barcamp organizers) had a great presentation on bootstrapping a company -- it was succinct, to the point and engaging. There were a lot of things in his presentation that I've learned myself through personal experience or from others, but I particularly enjoyed how everything was contextualized to India.

* Abhishek Agrawal had a presentation entitled "Why startup?" that preceded Gaurav's. I missed most of the presentation but caught the tail-end of it and I could tell it that it was a good session. Abhishek carpooled with me to and from barcamp and he struck me as a well-informed, analytical and motivated technologist. I look forward to following what he does with his new company.

* Some of the presenters were talented speakers -- VeerChand Bothra and Anuj Khurana were two guys that I'll single out.

* There were no female presenters, though there were several women in attendance.

* Sorry I couldn't join everyone for drinks later, but I plan to organize a geek dinner in the next week or so before I head back to the States. If you were interested in joining, drop me a line at rakesh at agrawal dot org.

Barcamp Delhi was great and I hope to see this technology community in Delhi really grow and flourish over time!



IMG_9763 IMG_9764 IMG_9767 IMG_9768 IMG_9769 IMG_9770 IMG_9772 IMG_9778 IMG_9782 IMG_9783 IMG_9787 IMG_9790 IMG_9792 IMG_9796 IMG_9798 IMG_9800 IMG_9801 IMG_9803 IMG_9804 IMG_9807 IMG_9808 IMG_9809 IMG_9810 IMG_9811 IMG_9813 IMG_9815 IMG_9816 IMG_9818 IMG_9819 IMG_9821 IMG_9824 IMG_9828 IMG_9831 IMG_9835 IMG_9837 IMG_9838 IMG_9839 IMG_9840 IMG_9841 IMG_9842 IMG_9843 IMG_9845 IMG_9846 IMG_9847 IMG_9850 IMG_9857 IMG_9865 IMG_9866 IMG_9869 IMG_9870 IMG_9871 IMG_9873 IMG_9875 IMG_9882 IMG_9883 IMG_9884 IMG_9887 IMG_9890 IMG_9893 IMG_9896 IMG_9897 IMG_9900 IMG_9902 IMG_9904 IMG_9908 IMG_9910 IMG_9911 IMG_9913 IMG_9914

3 Comments:

Blogger Vinu said...

ur photos at
one
you flickring :-)

10:08 PM  
Blogger Manu Sharma said...

Good Summary of your experience. It was an amazing experience for all of us.

7:10 AM  
Blogger rohit rajput said...

hi, i just heard about the group from a business contact- and would love to be a part of it.am hoping you could tell me how to start

10:22 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home