The Good

Attending foss.in/2009 felt great for me because I took comfort in the fact that there are still people out there who are passionate about code and passionate about software. That is becoming rarer and rarer off late. I think it’s the “5 year limit” that I have observed in batchmates, most of them don’t want to code any more, and have moved on to so many other fields. While that is okay, the problem is that it has become a fashion to dis IT and software field.

Another factor was that everything is in the cloud and everything is a website these days, so does open source as a process matter anymore? First of all, the applications are not open source and even if we have the code (rare situation), you and I can’t fix the application/website unless you host it yourself.

But the foss.in community made me remember the joy of coding and joy of hacking.

Kudos to Team Foss.in for making the only community event and only IT event that is worth attending. It was fantastic to see how the concept of workouts had just taken off. And everyone’s been saying that all the keynotes have been fantastic.

In case you are wondering, I’m not the only one who was so enthralled by the event, for example:

See Lakshman’s writeup on the same. And so on.

Bottom line? Shut up and hack!

The Bad

Will miss the direction of Atul Chitnis.

What was missing

What I felt was missing is a discussion on the state of the art of software in each field, not just specific PoTDs. And I think this is more of a community perspective rather than the organizers’ perspective — organizers just provide the platform, community provides the content, as Atul keeps reminding us.

For example, consider my pet topic, the state of NoSQL databases – what’s good, what’s not, is it strange or expected that so many of them have come up in the last 1-2 years and all of them are open source (or at least the ones that we hear of). Taking it a step further, how it affects other fields of software. I’ve attempted to ask this before in a session at barcamp on whether webapp frameworks will adapt to NoSQL.

Similarly, what is the future of compilers, will LLVM + clang replace GCC (as @artagnon was speculating)? Will WebKit and V8 take over the world and leave Mozilla + Tracemonkey behind? Why are there so few projects using AGPL? What does it take to get full database dumps out of Wikipedia ? Will open source phones never take off? How does Eucalyptus help have an alternative with EC2? How does appscale help have an alternative to GAE? And so on.

In toto, I think there are three parts to this and I believe only the third part of which is done well already by the community and organizers: (1) what are the different fields and layers of software, (2) what is the state of the art of open source software in those fields, (3) getting people started and involved. I feel that only when we think on these lines, we will achieve Atul’s stated vision of “open source being the mainstream, proprietary software being the special case”*.

Thoughts?

* No flamewars please. I believe that the world will be better off by having all the infrastructure as open source software and having only the business logic / trade secrets as the proprietary part. At each stage of evolution of software, the stack grows higher, and the infrastructure/open source stack can grow higher along with it. For example, Robot Open Source and the Hadoop umbrella.

It is the same kind of problem being faced by, say StartupBuzz.org which, I am guessing, wants to be the Hacker News of India. There are indeed topics that apply only to startups in India, from “Startup Morning”, to India’s first in-taxi magazine. Such interesting events and ideas are worthy of discussion.

There is value in such a community, but again, how to build it? StartupDunia has already put its thoughts on the subject but the question still remains.

Here are some of my thoughts.

Does it require credibility?

• Hacker News has Paul Graham and YCombinator behind it.
• ProBlogger Forums have ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse behind it.
• And the most recent example of StackOverflow.com that has Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood behind it.

So the question is whether there each community should be backed by up by a credible person who has a reasonable authority on the subject?

Does it require an offline face-to-face presence?

• Would the Headstart Network have taken off without all the Startup Saturdays?
• Would the OCC mailing list have taken off without the Sunday meetups?
• Would chat.proto.in have taken off without the big showcase events that made proto.in famous?

(On the same note, I want to point out that there are other startup events that I’ve come across are not communities, they just happen to have good publicity. I just wanted to draw out that distinction.)

Would StartupBuzz.org have taken off it was started by the existing Headstart/OCC/proto.in communities instead of a standalone presence?

Does it require a news site?

• How did StartupDunia, Pluggd.in, Trak.in and others take off?
• Why does TechCrunch have 2 million readers?
• Why doesn’t, say, the Steve Pavlina Forums have the same kind of numbers?

Is building a readership/community easier for news sites?

Does it require a blog?

How did Lifehacker.com, Groklaw.net, and others take off?

Is community building intertwined with building a blog?

For example, consider SmashingMagazine and its related forums, ProBlogger and its forums, TechCrunch and its comments section, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky are famous bloggers and so on.

Does it require specific social engineering?

I found the Joel Spolsky’s talk on StackOverflow very interesting from this perspective.

He talks about how they took into account that “Environment and UI influences behavior.”

He talked about the 9 things they used as core of the design of the site, and this specific design leads to the high return-rate on the community site. And I can attest to the fact that it does indeed work. It is a brilliant piece of social engineering. But then again, as he says, this particular model works only for professionals in such a field, and in this case, programmers.

Do watch the talk for more insights.

Are there some specific guidelines for it?

I am yet to read Yaro Starak’s “Membership Site Mastermind” or Chris Guillebeau’s “279 Days to Overnight Success” guides, but I see that they touch upon this topic in detail.

Maybe they’ve already solved this question?

Your Thoughts?

What are your thoughts? What do you think it takes to build a community?

• How did IndiaMike.com become so popular among travelers in India?
• How did BroadbandForum.in become so popular among internet users in India?
• How did PagalGuy.com get so many MBA students?

Is it sheer good content and number of years? Or being the first-to-market? Or is there more to it?

To be honest, I don’t go to Barcamp for the sessions per se, it is mainly for the people and this is one of the most relaxed ways to catch up with friends and make new ones. I met a lot of people and had very good conversations.

My own session on webdev frameworks and their relation to newer technologies such as cloud databases had a rocky start because there were lot of first-time Barcampers and were expecting a talk-style session. Luckily, I was saved by 3-4 guys in the audience who got it and we had a lively discussion. The takeaway is that, yes, there are interesting possibilities when we natively integrate our webdev frameworks and cloud databases (via modifying the ORMs) and cloud computing facilities. A few people were interested in my suggestion to carry the conversation forward in some sort of mailing list. So please join the “evolving-webdev” mailing list if you are interested in exploring these technologies.

The other interesting session I attended was on philosophies of yoga by Shashikant Joshi. As expected, he gave a very different take on yoga than what we normally hear. He started off by explaining the meaning of the word ‘yog’ as “state of mind” and what our ancient scriptures say on how to attain bliss and remove sorrow. It was hard for me to not be reminded of GTD philosophy, especially the “mind like water” concept. I felt guilty that there is so much already written by our ancestors that we ignore and wait for people to rediscover it and preach it.

I missed Shree Kumar’s calligraphy session because it was at the same time. Oh well.

Besides that, there was a whole lot of hallway conversations.

Gopal was teaching people how to solve a Rubik’s cube. He has it nailed down to a few algorithms, I can’t even fathom how he had the patience to derive those algorithms. We timed him solving it. The first time he took 1 min 57 seconds to solve it. The second time he took 1 min 36 seconds. Phew.

Then in another freewheeling conversation, we were talking about Zeno’s paradox and all sorts of stuff like that.

All in all, two non-stop days of fun reiterated why Barcamp remains one of my favorite events.

Thanks to all the planners (@ashwin, @daaku, @dkris, @fagunbhavsar, @hnprashanth, @viralsachde and others) who made it happen, and to Yahoo! for sponsoring the venue.

You can read more about what happened via the #bcb8 tag.

I’ve added a page on my wiki to list the type of common activities possible in India right from cycling to movie appreciation. Let me know if I can add more variety to the given mix of activities. I’m interested in figuring out what activities do people take up.

“What do you do for work?” the doctor asked me at the beginning of the interview.

“Well, I’m trying to start my own social movement.”

(There was a long pause, but he didn’t ask anything else about that. Instead, he looked at the next item on the list.)

“Do you take any medications?”

“Not usually, but when I need to, I buy them in Africa.”

(Another pause.)

“Do you exercise regularly?”

“Yes, I just ran a marathon on a cruise ship last week!”

Such a person should surely be interesting.

That’s how I first read about Chris Guillebeau (via Cal Newport).

So when Chris mentioned on his blog that he has a manifesto coming up soon, I was eagerly waiting. He calls it a “A Brief Guide to World Domination: How to Live a Remarkable Life in a Conventional World”.

Well, surely, there have been many people who have made tall claims over the years, why this should be any different? Because this guy walks the talk. What else can you say about someone who has visited 83 countries so far and he’s only 30 years of age. His goal is to visit the remaining 115 countries by April 7, 2013. How’s that for a goal?

What I liked about the manifesto is that it reminds me of a rule that I’ve been following off late: “Enough fundas, Back to fundamentals.” The manifesto does not tell you anything earth-shattering but makes you think about the simple basics of your life.

If you choose the path of being “just like everybody else”, then you’re already set because that is what majority of the world does.

If you choose the path of “non-conformity”, then be prepared to face all the problems but at the end of it all, you’ll get to live the life that you want (assuming that’s what you want).

If you want to truly go for BHA goals (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), then you need to take care of yourself and contribute to others as well. The latter is not simply charity, but there are several ways. After all, the greatest joy a passionate programmer or artist can get is when he/she sees someone using/admiring what they created and they are getting benefitted from it. And so on.

All this reminds me of this quote by John Davis:

You all laugh at me because I’m different, I laugh at you because you’re all the same.

That’s what I say to myself when people stare at me in the mornings when I’m running with a fuel belt around my waist. Hey, it may look funny, but I need that water while I’m running so that I don’t end up dehydrating (which is bad, speaking from experience). So I may look unconventional, but I need that water, and that’s how I want to do running.

So what else have I done unconventionally?

Chris says that “The only things you’ll need to give up are assumptions, expectations, and the comfort zone that holds you back from greatness.” I certainly have given up on assumptions and expectations. The comfort zone is still something that holds me back. I first shook this off by taking the plunge to quit my job without even knowing what’s going to happen next. In fact, it’s been more than a couple of months since then and I still don’t know where I’ll be a few months from now. But I have some ideas, some things I’m working on.

Not to say that the past two months has been easy. I’ve been to hell and back. I was looking for a period of self-discovery and boy, did I get it. I learned some things about myself:

• My first biggest fear is that I have no skills.
• My second biggest fear is not failure, it’s boredom and lack of motivation.

That’s it. Nothing else scares me or bothers me. Not even the fear of not getting a job tomorrow.

Getting out of that comfort zone led me to understand this about myself and now I’m actively working to prove to myself that I can overcome these fears. Hell, even writing this here where anyone can read it is a commitment to myself that yes, I am indeed working on overcoming them.

One thing keeps me going is another principle that at the end of my life, on my death bed, I should reflect back and say to my family and myself: “No Regrets”. Hard words to live up to.

Will I be successful at what I do? Will things work out? Am I just fooling myself? I really don’t know. Perhaps, the answer to that is in Steve Pavlina’s words:

So what? Who cares? If I get up on stage and bomb, it just isn’t that big a deal. I gave myself permission to fail. But I wouldn’t give myself permission not to try.

– Steve Pavlina

Both parts of what Steve Pavlina says are so inspiring. For one, how many people will really care if I flop? Most people may want to know about it just so that they can laugh about it or ridicule the person. Second, about this fear of failure… I’ve become convinced that it doesn’t matter whether you fail or not. You never know until you try, right? As I mentioned, I’m more afraid of not trying hard enough.

What matters is if you enjoyed the journey, and hopefully, gone after those BHA goals and achieved some of them.

In the end, ask yourself this question posed by Chris:

If you had two minutes with anyone in the world who has the power to influence the rest of your life, what would you say to them? “Hi, my name is _____ and I’m going to _________.”

What would you say?

If you don’t know your answer, I would highly recommend that you download the manifesto, take a printout, set aside an hour far away from humanity and internet, and read it.

Later they asked me over email. My reply was “Why Ooty!?”. They replied saying “It doesn’t matter. We’re going for the drive.” Two days later, we three were driving to Ooty on bikes at night.

My descriptions below are in twitter style as an ode to how the trip happened. ( But of course, my usual writing style will resume after this post )

We started off at 8 at night. First stop was some lip-smacking food at Kamat Lokaruchi:

9.10 pm : We’re on the way! 3 twitterers on bikes.

9.25 pm : Getting out of Bangalore is the toughest thing.

9.30 pm : @scorpion032 says 2020 will also be the year of the linux desktop.

10.32 pm : @cruisemaniac and @scorpion032 are tweeting away…

1.40 am : Taking a break.

2.33 am : Admiring the mysore palace…

3.16 am : Sleep getting to me… But we’re taking breaks and having fun. In Nanjangud.

3.20 am : Another break.

3.34 am : Listening to My Sacrifice at 330 am at 70 kmph on bike with the wind in your hair is something to be experienced.

4.10 am : We find a freakin’ coffee day in the middle of nowhere. Waiting for capuccino.

6.15 am : Mudumulai forest.

6.20 am : Animals! Elephant, deer, peacock, mongoose, eagle, woodpecker, … All right there next to us… Thank heavens the elephant didn’t think we were pesky…

6.45 am : Exiting Mudumulai forest.

My favorite photo from this trip (notice the clouds and the bike):

The killer part of the trip was the 36 hair pin bends required to scale Ooty for more than a kilometre of altitude. The bikes started choking. Even the Pulsar bike had issues with the climb!

7.31 am : Ooty has nice scenery.

Rest of the trip was simply crashing for sleep, waking up for food, and sitting in the patio in the cold night discussing everything from Steve Jobs to big company goofups to…

… the guy who was taking a snap with the lens in the opposite direction and never realized it.

The ride back to Bangalore was equally tiring but faster (9 hours vs 11 hours):

It was a picture-perfect trip throughout. Probably because the wavelength of the three guys matched – we were ready for anything and enjoying the ride was the main thing for us. We didn’t have any planning except for the start times of the to and fro journeys leading to doing things on-the-fly.

And I totally cracked up at the geeky humor we shared. For example, not many people would laugh at statements like “Q: What do clinic allclear shampoo and KDE4 have in common??? A: both are bad ‘gooey’/gui things!!!”

The stay was comfortable mainly thanks to Shammi’s Rooms and Cottages for being such hospitable people. Maybe its because they opened just a week before we got there and they’re fresh at these things, but it was totally worth being there. I highly recommend them if you ever happen to go to Ooty.

Bottom line: Twitter is “social networking done right”. Because people get to know each other by their thoughts and not their profiles. The fact that three people got together for a road trip and had awesome fun is a testament that twitter (or if you’re from the Web 1.0 days, IRC) as a network works!

Second bottom line: As Ashwin reminded us, if you want to really understand why people like biking, you have to understand why dogs stick their heads out of the car.

One year ago, on this day, we launched ion, the ipod charger. The launch was just one blog post. That’s it. Within two hours, Atul Chitnis bought the first ion in our online store. We celebrated.

But hold on, let’s rewind the story a bit.

As people might have heard in our recent running talk, it all started when Vikram, Niara and myself started training together for the 2006 Bangalore Marathon.

During one of our runs, Vikram told us that he had created his own charger circuit and came up with this wacky idea of manufacturing and selling them. I never took it seriously but Niara did. She convinced Vikram to take the idea forward. Nearly six months later, the idea had taken wings.

The prototype looked nothing like something we could sell.

Later, I was planning to attend the first proto.in. Vikram and Niara joined in and we went together. I was totally floored by the energy of the people there and the fire in the eyes of these startup guys. I told those two that they should talk to this guy called Arif Vakil of “Vakil Housing” fame and how he was looking to fund interesting ideas. Immediately, Vikram swung into action, approached Vakil and started explaining the idea. Surprisingly, he showed interest!

Luckily, Vikram had brought his prototype and went to fetch it from his bag. Then Vikram started searching for his iPod when Arif said “Let’s try with my iPod”. Wow. That moment. Imagine if your VC is a would-be customer and the product solves a problem that he himself faces. Nothing like it.

We connected Arif’s iPod to the charger and the charger to a power socket. The blue LED came on. The iPod was showing the charging symbol. We all had smiles on our faces. Arif was impressed and went on to even ask us where we live and so on. That means he really was interested.

After that incident, it was time to head back. Vikram was on an all-time high. That was when we were all convinced that we were on to something. And throughout the bus journey from Chennai to Bangalore, those two convinced me to join ion. I wasn’t so sure. Yeah, it was a Saturdays-only part-time thing. Yeah, Vikram and me had discussed about such things endlessly. But still, I wasn’t sure.

I thought about it the next day and thought “Why not?” I don’t lose much if it bombs and it was a good excuse for us three to keep meeting up.

For various reasons, we didn’t approach Vakil for funding and put in the initial investment ourselves. And we went from shopping for running shoes to shopping for resistors and capacitors and modifying Drupal code.

Then there was the countless decision-making sessions like coming up with poster ideas and then the stories about how we decided the logo for ion, how we landed in trouble with the cops, and finally the launch of ion.

We sent an email to friends asking them to forward to their company internal groups and anybody who would be interested. We also gave posters to put up on their company notice boards. That was pretty much our ‘marketing strategy’. The idea was that we marketed it as an iPod charger and our target audience was the techie crowd.

We marketed it as an iPod charger even though it will work with anything that can be charged with USB right from mobile phones to battery chargers. We use the term iPod charger because that’s what people have most demand for. The second part about targeting techies was because they will be the ones who will look to finding a solution that is cheaper than the official charger which costs 2000 rupees but still is reliable. Ours was one-fifth that price.

The most humbling experience for me was trying to sell ion outside the Aerosmith concert. That was such a good example of a wrong person (me) in the right place doing the job not suited for him. But yet Niara and me did it for ion.

Then came the amazing customer feedback and our highest point – getting featured in a half-page article in Economic Times:

And yes, Arif congratulated us.

But you want to know what’s the craziest part? We made just 200 pieces of ion. Yes, that’s it. 200 ions. Crazy. And see how far it went.

After that ET article happened, we ran out of stock. That was six months ago. Many people have asked me why we’re not selling more ions. So I thought I’ll tell the hidden part of the story today – We never intended ion to live longer than those 200 pieces. It was just a business experiment for us, nothing more. Why? To learn what it takes to convert an idea to a reliable quality product and take it to market.

We never called ourselves a startup back then. That has happened only in hindsight. In fact, I was in it because I thought I could help since I had some experience in maintaining my own websites and maybe I can learn a thing or two in running an ecommerce store.

After we managed to the finish selling the batch of 200 pieces and made decent profit, Vikram moved to USA, Niara moved on to other things in life and so did I.

But the response hasn’t stopped. Even last Thursday (Apr 17), we got emails from four different people in a single day asking when we’ll be back in stock. Crazy, I tell you.

I have had so many personal failures and failed projects in the past few years that it seemed stupid to kill a successful project of ours. So Vikram and myself have been working on reviving ion. We hope to be back with a batch of second generation ions in the next month.

The experiment continues.

Had an impromptu discussion on development on Nokia Phones with Ashwin and another person who worked in Nokia. Surprised to hear that it costs so much!

Then, attended a session on “Pattern Labs” who are trying to create a better knowledge base for GAP, a conglomerate of NGOs for sustainable development. What they’re trying to achieve was quite admirable and definitely needed, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t understand what they’re trying to do in this Pattern Labs and what kind of software they’re trying to develop.

This was followed by a 5-10 min discussion on Web 2.0 for K-12 education, it was interesting to note that there were few success stories where kids used a wiki to collaboratively write a poem using the “diamond pattern” they teach in school and were benefited by this approach.

Then Rajiv Poddar initiated a discussion on the legal status of VoIP in India and why there should be a correction. Basically, VoIP calls cannot reach a PSTN/PLMN i.e. landline or mobile phones in India. Why? Because it will hurt VSNL’s revenues. An equally relevant issue is that VSNL is the only gateway in India trying to control all traffic for no real reason. But why is VoIP important? Because it makes phone calls damn inexpensive and there are many innovations that can be done around it – right from system integration to enabling live voice discussions for a website, all at a low cost.

Rajiv equated this situation to the telephony space – the government was afraid that BSNL won’t make money, but once the space was opened, everyone now knows the story of the rapid growth of telephony and communication in India, after all India is the fastest growing market. It did more good than harm.

Previously I had known that there are some legal issues with VoIP but had never ventured to learn about it until I happened to walk into this session. A group called Voice of VoIP was created on the spot to take the discussion forward and see if something can be done about it.

Then I went into a session on Scoping, Closures and Objects in Javascript. The speaker Venkatesh Choppella was a professor at IIIT, Trivandrum and held a Ph.D in computer languages. I was mighty impressed that there are such lecturers out there! Interestingly, he teaches JavaScript as the first language for some of his classes at his university. I learned a bit about JavaScript and language theory.

Then, Vinayak Hegde had an interesting session on High performance websites. Again, the crowd had a lively discussion on tips and tricks right from something called “CSS sprites” to using YSlow, Minify, Expires Headers, ETags, and so on.

And in between all this, I met many people. In fact, when we were mingling, few of us decided to go to the Coffee Day outlet in the next building to get something cold. It was such a sultry weather. And there we found, Shourya and another college student (Jayanth?) playing guitars and singing Def Leppard songs!

There were some amazingly funny and insightful discussions going on as well, many of which I can’t write here, but I’ll especially remember Kushal Das’ stories. I never thought someone had the guts to pull off giving an Intel 865 motherboard to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day! And they even have fights over GCC. Wow, that’s like a geek’s dream, right? Anyway, I wish him all the best, hope they’re together for a long time and more.

The day ended with a feedback session on the good, bad and ugly of Barcamp. Most people had suggestions and cribs but they said they got used to it once they understood the idea of how Barcamps work – it’s meant to be not organized and scheduled properly. Things should happen on-the-fly. And again, people asked for video archives of the sessions because they missed many due to the parallel tracks. Simple answer – get a video camera and record. If 4-5 people can volunteer, the problem is solved. The real problem is not enough people willing to do these things. Barcamp works only when everyone pitches in, whether you are initiating a session, volunteering or at least putting your name on the wiki.

There were more discussions, but in the end people agreed that the current format is great and nothing needs to be changed for number 7.

Bottom line: Adjust maadi. Don’t make it a “conference”!

There are only a few things that can get me high – running, passionate techie discussions, meeting new people, and interesting and insightful conversations. I had a good dose of all of these in two days, so BCB6 was simply well-spent time for me. And it looks like many other campers feel the same way as well.

P.S. If you want to be updated on when’s the next barcamp, just follow the mailing list and the website.

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.

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).