Barcamp Bangalore 6 Day 2

Day 2 of Barcamp Bangalore No. 6 (Apr 20 Sun) started off on
a pleasant note because I just had to stop and admire the greenery of
the IIMB campus.

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
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list and the
website.