For the uninitiated, Barcamp is an “unconference” which means its a place where people meet, but all the usual rules of a conference do not apply (hence the ‘un’). The best part about any conference is usually the hallway crowds where people say hi and end up engaging in some of the most passionate discussions. Imagine if a conference had only hallway discussions as an agenda – You want to discuss something? Great, go write the topic on a post-it and stick it on the wall in the available time slots. That’s what Barcamp is.

Barcamp actually started off as a response to the FOOcamp i.e. Friends of O’Reilly Camp to which only the crème de la crème were invited and others had to stay out. So people like Tantek and Messina got together and decided to make a new “for the people, by the people” format which was the exact opposite of FOOcamp. And since programming has had “foo” and “bar” as standard variable names in examples, they called it “barcamp”. That’s right, it’s got nothing to do with alcohol. Now, Barcamps have become a worldwide phenomenon.

Day 1 of Barcamp Bangalore #6 (Apr 19 Sat) started with an introduction session where everyone stands up and explains what sessions they’ll be initiating at which room or “dari” and at what time. This itself was an indicator of how the next 2 days were going to be.

Since we techies are traditionally not used to getting up early on time, the sessions started half an hour late. In any case, the whole crowd started mingling.

The first actual session I attended was Kaashif demonstrating self-defence. Seriously. He explained that he has had unsavoury experiences at places like Marathahalli at night and its important to know how to defend yourself, not that you should go looking for trouble. He explained things well right from what are your opponents weak points regardless of their size to the three basic steps – do the defend action, do the ’shout/cry’ that happens when you hit with force, and then run.

For step 3, people had to come to our running discussion. That went better than I would have expected.

The rest of the day was of two parts for me – fleeting in and out of discussions and meeting people.

One thing about Barcamp is the no-holds-barred discussions. Diplomacy has no place here, let’s talk what you are really thinking. For example, there are many startups showcasing their products and taking feedback. One such startup that I witnessed was LifeInLines. The crowd, sorry to say this, literally murdered them. They were like “This is just twitter minus rss plus privacy controls. Is there anything else?” and the guys had a hard time convincing them of the value in their website. It reminded me of the recent discussion on Aren’t There Real Problems To Solve? Any way, I think this is the perfect reason why startups should showcase at Barcamp – you’re not going to get more brutal and more honest feedback than here.

Then I met a lot of interesting people. For example, Anand Bora who has an interesting passion called “mathematical art”. Wow, I didn’t even know such stuff existed. While we were talking, he scribbled something on a box and showed me, it was my name ‘Swaroop’. Then he turned the box around, it still read ‘Swaroop’! Wow again. Apparently, they’re called ambigrams and he’s done many of these. We had a long discussion about life and thoughts and where we’ll be in 5 years. And a few hours before that, I didn’t even know him.

Then bumped into people like Vid Ayer, Arun and a guy from Cisco, and they asked me about my ’startup’ experiences. This topic was a story by itself, so I’ll write about it separately. What was interesting, was putting faces to names. I’ve seen the name ‘Vid Ayer’ on mailing lists and blogs, but now I get to actually meet the person. This trend continued in the twitter meetup as well.

I think the ‘dari’ idea was awesome – just a bunch of carpets where people can sit and gather around. The discussions varied from “The Great Dating Session” to “Lessons from Kamasutra, not that kind” to writing Mozilla applications. Heck, even the sessions varied from raising awareness of the girl child issue to asynchronous i/o.

The only problem is that sometimes there were no topics of interest to me and sometimes there were 3 things happening in parallel and I wanted to attend all of them. But, yeah, that’s a problem that can’t be solved.

The whole day was fun. I couldn’t wait to get back to Day 2.

One fine day, I was running by myself. It was a few weeks before Barcamp Bangalore 5. I got an idea that I should talk about a non-techie topic at Barcamp since I’ve been giving tech talks for the past few years and I wanted a change of pace. I brainstormed many ideas on the reason for the talk, what to say and how to explain, etc. all during that one run.

Unfortunately I couldn’t attend BCB5. But I stored the notes in a safe place. And when BCB6 was announced, I wanted to be sure to talk this time around.

A few weeks back, Ramjee called me and asked whether we can talk about running. I smiled and thought to myself “Great minds think alike”. Or at least “Runners think alike”.

So I made a ppt and we landed at Barcamp on Saturday morning. We had never discussed the presentation. And we were going to give a session on it. Truly unconference style.

Note: The slides below have been modified to make it useful for a web audience. It has a lot more text now.

| Download

Barcamp crowds are very inquisitive and so we didn’t actually go past half the slides, which is actually a good thing. Instead, we discussed a wide range of things about running right from finding good places to run to trouble with dogs.

In spite of the delays causing us to start at 12:45 (which means almost lunch time) the discussion went on till 1:45 and 90% of the 30-40 odd crowd were present till the end. When we went to grab what was left of lunch, lot of people asked us questions including how to avoid knee pain (tip: it’s the shoes). Since questions are always a good sign, I think it was a successful discussion.

We both still consider ourselves amateurs at running but at the end of the day its an activity we like and Barcamp is a perfect platform to talk about our passions.

Oh, and if you’re still not a believer, I’ll end with a quote:

Games require skill. Running requires endurance, character, pride, physical strength, and mental toughness. Running is a test, not a game. A test of faith, belief, will, and trust in ones self. So hardcore that it needs a category all to itself to define the pain. When game players criticize, it’s because they aren’t willing to understand, not because they’re stronger. Running is more than a sport; it’s a lifestyle. If you have to ask us why we run, you’ll never understand, so just accept.

– Jessica Propst

Update: SlideShare decided to make it a Barcamp spotlight presentation:

The online slides has had 1274 views and 116 downloads as of this writing (2008-05-04 Sun 10:04 PM).

Yesterday, I attended Day 2 of the Web Innovation 2007 conference.

The irony to note is that the conference website is so NOT Web 2.0. For example, where are the slides that people can download? These guys can learn a thing or two from the foss.in website and conference. Again, for a web innovation conference, why is there no wifi? How are you supposed to access the websites?

On the other hand, this conference has been surprising to me in the sense that it actually turned out to be interesting. I think the quality of people who have come to speak here is high and that’s probably because these people are high up in the decision-making chain and they have come to talk about what they do best – websites and business.

Of course, the other half of the speakers are doing just boring sales pitches but that didn’t deter the audience from asking tough questions and seeking their value from it. They even directly questioned how their company lives up to what was described in the presentation.

Continuing Day 1’s trend, here are the transcribed notes:

• Jayabalan (CTO, Netmagic) on “Building scalable and resilient infrastructure for web applications”

  • Users, Connectivity, IT infrastructure, Application infrastructure
  • Challenges – Growth (number of concurrent users), Hardware failure, Software bugs, Security threats
  • Management and maintenance, Connectivity/routing issues, Secure connectivity, Cost
  • Failures can’t be avoided
  • Features and functionality alone not sufficient, Performance also required
  • Difficult to get people with end-to-end knowledge
  • Recommended setup – Storage, SANSw, Web + App + DB, Switching, Accelerator, Firewall
  • Develop for future – scalability in all layers
  • Performance optimizing techniques – Compression, TCP multiplexing, TCP optimization, TCP buffering, Caching, CDN, Load balancing, URL/content/cookie switching, Content modification, SSL offloading, Surge protection
  • Please outsource parts of these infrastructure to experts who have good infrastructure and service
  • Netmagic caters to all of the above (can it get more blatant than this?)
  • jb at netmagicsolutions.com
  • Replies to audience that Yes, Providers in India do have such infrastructure now. Power and Connectivity are major issues that you can’t scale in-house, so outsource it.

• Rohit Varma (Founder and CEO, Techtribe) on “Delivering Value through Social Networks”

  • (Unfortunately, missed this session in the business track because the session in the other tech track was long)
  • Get into the press, only way, do not depend on viral marketing

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Yesterday, I attended Day 1 of the Web Innovation 2007 conference.

The first half of the day was quite useful, but the latter half turned out to be pure marketing pitches by the sponsors.

First and foremost, I think the title of the conference is a misnomer. Although it says “Web Innovation 2007: The Nextgen Web Technology Revolution: 2.0 & Beyond”, it should have been “Web 2.0 : How can India catch up” – the discussions were really about the ‘current’ situation of things rather than ‘innovation’ or ‘future’. By ‘current’ I mean, the internet products and services market in the western world and how India can catch up.

The No.1 and possibly only gripe that most speakers mentioned which is a barrier for internet and Web 2.0 to become omnipresent is that broadband connectivity is pitiful in India.

I agree to this as far as locality reach, reliability, and pricing is concerned. However, let’s compare it to mobile phones which is the second-most discussed topic, on how it is booming and all that. Why did mobile phones take off and not broadband? I think it’s because mobile phones had a killer application – communication. That too, communication any time, anywhere.

Similarly, let’s take the case of computers in many shops and distributors – accounting solutions whether it is by the local software shop or well-known ones like Tally, they bought computers just so that they can use these software. Just like Lotus 1-2-3 for Apple Mac I in the history of computers.

Unless we have killer applications that people in India want to use, why would anyone want to buy a computer or a broadband connection? And if there are killer applications, won’t there be demand for broadband connections, and won’t supply follow? Just like the mobile telephony market today?

Maybe I’m completely off on this one, but I still don’t yet see killer applications on the web today for the common man in India, let alone Web 2.0-style applications. Forget common man, how about the educational aspects of things, if there are products and services that can be beneficial to school and college students, that alone is a big deal. As B V Naidu (one of the advisors in the Karnataka IT committee) said, 54% of the Indian population is below 20 years!

Naidu also mentioned that there are 7 million new phones being bought every month, you won’t find such a high number anywhere else in the world. Yet, there are a meagre 1.6 million mobile internet users. Again, what are the killer applications for them? At least, I never felt the need for internet on my mobile phone. (As an aside, getting it working for the first time is a pain which is another major factor).

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Kamla Bhatt has been tracking the Hack Day India and posting many interviews and videos. The videos include the demos by the hackers, and here’s the video where we present (from minutes 03:10 to 05:09) :

Update : And a mention in the Financial Express

I was at Yahoo! Open Hack Day at Bangalore on Friday and Saturday. 24 hours of hacking, meeting lots of old friends, and sarcasm unlimited. It doesn’t get better than this.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 02:30 PM
  • Arrived at Taj.
  • Registered myself, got the schwag
  • Met Raghu and discussed the presentation he’ll be making on Flex
  • Social networking, the offline kind

• 2007-10-05 Fri 03:30 PM
  • The presentations start.
  • Joe starts the ceremonies.
  • Chris starts the first talk on what Yahoo can do for you. Yahoo APIs, that is.

• 2007-10-05 Fri 05:30 PM
  • On the fly, we three become a team : Pradeep, Raghu and myself.
  • Pradeep and myself know each other from Deep Root Linux projects, after college hours, in PESIT. Raghu and me are colleagues. Pradeep and Raghu met the first time today.
  • We start discussing ideas…
  • WiFi’s good

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Two days before the BMS College Information Science Department Fest called “Genesis 2007″, I received an email from a couple of students asking me to talk about “introduction to open source”. Apparently, they were frantically looking for a speaker. Since I’m not the right person for this, I agreed to come only if they didn’t find someone else… and I ended up going there on Friday.

The talk was supposed to be an introduction for a day-long session on Open Source Hacking which was organized by few enthu students trying to get other students interested.

I started making the presentation on the midnight before Friday, so I didn’t have a very polished presentation, but I had something reasonable. The title of the talk was “How to make money from coding (or Why Open Source)”. That should get their attention.

15 minutes before the talk, there were 2 students in the hall. I wanted to start the talk on time and decided to start without much crowd anyway. My sore throat was troubling me and I was coughing every two minutes. Anyway, I started off with a funny anecdote. It flopped. Oh boy.

Then, I decided they’re not warmed up yet, and recovered quickly. 15 minutes later, the 225 seater hall was full. Phew.

An hour later, they were still all there, they were asking lots of questions and they seemed genuinely interested. I hope the students do take FOSS software seriously, if not for the freedom and open source aspects, at least for their own career aspects which I detailed out in the talk. (And I’m sure once they’re hooked, they will later “get” the freedom and open source aspects.)

Why do I say that? Well, it comes down to the first question in the Q&A session – “How to get into Yahoo!?”, and I replied “Well, do you want to know how I got into Yahoo!?”. A unanimous yes. I told them the MySQL story, the Python story and few other tidbits. Now, they’re really listening. I pointed out that I didn’t have any special skills, just the knowledge of these two open source software got me the job at Y!, and it saved me from a service industry job (no offense meant, just a personal preference).

Next question: “Any regrets in college life?”. It caused a flashback

in my mind on Atul’s words

“There are two times you innovate in your life – one is when you are a student, the other is when you retire.” Back then, I didn’t believe him. Now, I do. So, I told them “I haven’t yet regretted not scoring well in college. This is the only ‘free time’ you have, so use it well.” I got lot of smirks and “oh, please, we have so much to study” looks. I said “Two years later, I’ll see how many of you come back and tell me I’m wrong.”

Then, after the session ended, a few electrical students said they wanted to get into the software industry and don’t know where to start. I told them that some of the best programmers I’ve known are from a mechanical background, so that’s okay. You should prove your skills, that’s all, your background shouldn’t matter, although it may be difficult to get your first job because you’re not a computer science student. Then, a telecom student. I was happy about this guy because he said he wanted to remain in the telecom domain but learn coding really well, I said that’s a very good decision he’s taken and told him to see open source projects such as Asterisk and OpenMoko. He said “I’m in my final year, just 8 months to go, am I too late?” I said “8 months is a really long time, you’re not late, you just have to start now.” (8 months is a long time when you think about it, but it seems to fly away so soon).

After that, students headed towards the computer lab where I gave a crash course in using subversion. I had to get back to work, so I didn’t stay for the rest of the day, but I heard there was a “good response” from the students.

In the end, I don’t know if anyone was inspired about FOSS or not, but I did see that few students absorbed the fact that knowledge and projects are going to get them good jobs, not just marks (of course, you do have to have a decent score), and working on FOSS projects is one way to achieve that.

P.S. If you’ve read this far, and you’re interested in learning how to contribute to open source software, then you’re in luck, because the foss.in community event is coming up soon. You can start right now by reading Atul’s latest post on foss.in.

Update : A related must-read article is “How to Get a Job Like Mine” by Aaron Swartz.

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

Yesterday morning, I dropped in on the OpenCoffeeClub Bangalore, 2nd edition. It’s supposed to be a place where people interested in entrepreneurship show up, have coffee together and discuss.

The theme of the meet was marketing. There were some interesting discussions, and the one that interested me was when Pratik (and friend) from Muziboo explained some of their experiences followed by the subsequent discussions and free advice and suggestions thrown in. One good advice was to actively market Muziboo to the teachers and students of the various music schools, “there are around 10 of them in just the Koramangala area”, and so on.

I was pleasantly surprised to see people have actually heard about ion and I was asked to tell the story of how we chose our poster design, people found it amusing and relevant (“market research”) at the same time. I gave some inputs that offline marketing, but targeted offline marketing really does help.

Although I didn’t mention it at the meet, we did stand outside the Aerosmith concert and marketed ion to people. That was such a humbling experience. Sales is hard.

Coming back to OpenCoffeeClub, the mix of people was not surprising - mostly “software engineers” who are ashamed of the term. The interesting people were a lawyer, a chartered accountant, a director of the entrepreneurship wing of an IT college, a non-IT businessman, etc.

The lawyer made an interesting point that she couldn’t get one of her contacts to come visit OpenCoffeeClub because 2 hours every 2 weeks sounded like too much time for him. That’s interesting because if someone was really passionate about their startup/business/passion, they would be out there working hard at it, instead of talking about it. Not to take away anything from the meet, but people need to be out there “doing their thing”.

I guess where the meet plays a role is it gives a support network to

those people who are about to start off on their venture and need the

confidence and advice in interactions with others, and the feeling

that other people are into it too. Maybe that explains why there were

more wannabes than been-there-done-that kind of people. However, the

intensity of people that they wanted to do something was quite

palpable. It reminded me of the title of Gusteau’s cookbook in

Ratatouille

“Anyone can cook”. If you need to be in such an atmosphere, you should think of attending the next meet (it happens on alternate Sundays).

It also reminded me of a chance meeting I had with the founder and CEO of Pepper Square at the Flex Users’ Group meet last Friday. It was refreshing to meet someone whose mission was to make people understand the value of “design”. Even though he’s 42 years old (although he appeared half that age), he still has the “we’ll change the world” attitude in him. Inspiring stuff.

I was fortunate to attend proto.in in Chennai on Sunday. What was it all about? It’s about startups in India. It was the opportunity for an Indian entrepreneur to showcase his/her ideas and business plans, to look for funding, people to work with, partners or simply grab media attention.

27 companies were showcased and they each had 8 minutes to present their product. Working prototypes and demos were encouraged, ppts discouraged. Companies were asked to focus on questions like ‘who are you’, ‘what are you doing’, ‘what makes you different’ and ‘what are you looking for’.

I had written down some notes during the entire day:

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I managed to catch the last day of the Bangalore Book Festival 2006 – I was surprised to see the number of people thronging the fair! It was truly a family affair – and we bought nearly a dozen books ranging from spiritual to tech to comics to Sherlock Holmes . I’m glad we visited the fair in the afternoon because, judging by the size of the audience, this place would have been suffocating in the peak evening time.

It was nice to see that the habit of reading real books hasn’t been lost and hasn’t been overtaken by the ubiquitous internet. And it was good to see a wide range of books (from a never-ending list of book vendors) other than the usual copies of Paulo Coelho and Mein Kampf. The disappointing thing was that most of the vendors were generic – everyone catered to everyone’s needs, and in turn, there were no books for specialized audiences – whatever happened to art books, or medical books, or travel books?

Relatedly, I just finished reading Digital Fortress by Dan Brown, it was fun to read. Any recommendations on novels in the same genre?

Bangalore is such a happening place that there are more things coming up:

• foss.in/2006 is just around the corner on Nov 24-26! Register now.

• Bengaluru Habba is happening on December 3-10 – It’s a pity that the official site is still under construction (and the dates on this logo seems to be “outdated”). The official website is BengalooruHabba.com (Thanks to Karthik for pointing it out).

• More events listed at eventsbangalore.net: