So.. I had wanted to attend un-conferences since a long time now, but didn’t really get to know the events on time, or the events were outside of Delhi/NCR. So this even was the perfect opportunity for me to explore! The even was held at the Noida Sector 59 office of Impetus Software, which was quite close to my own office, so i kinda knew the area a bit. The event was scheduled to start at 9:30 AM. I, along with Deepak, Prateek and Apoorv reached the venue around 9:15 AM. We did all the registration formalities, and then proceeded to the conference room. We were one of the first few people to arrive there. The first “known” person we met there was Amit. He greeted us with his usual smile (dunno whether he recognized me and Apoorv or not though 😛 ). Then we met this really friendly guy named Ankit, who had come with his baby daughter, who was later declared as the youngest attendee of the BarCamp 😀
So the sessions started with all of us introducing ourselves, along with tagging the event with 3 tags each 🙂 The event started with Navjot’s presentation about GuruGeeks. The presentation was enjoyable, and i appreciate all the effort he’s putting into it! Next up were Manik and Akhil of the Vinsol team with a presentation on deploying rails apps on Amazon’s EC2, again being a very interesting presentation, it captured the attention of all present there. They even showed us a live demo of how to go about it! I just LOVED their sweatshirts! It had “Ruby makes me happy” with a cute ruby thingy on them. Check them out in one of the pics below. Next up was Vineet of Impetus presenting on “Planning Poker – Agile Estimation for Dummies”. After this presentation, the organizers decided to make two batches and proceed with 2 sessions simultaneously. So 2 groups were formed, one was the technical group and the other was the social group (which had presentations related to blogging and social networking). I remained with the technical group. Next up was Jignesh of Amazon with his highly informative and impressive session on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 web services. This was the best session of the entire event (i hope those who attended would agree with me 😛 ). We had to break in between for lunch. Jignesh completed his session after lunch. We had Abhishek with his session “Everyday Productivity with Windows Live Tools”. I personally didn’t like this session at all. It was more like a marketing attempt from Microsoft. I mean the guy was showing off windows live mail (outlook express replacement for vista) as if it was the ONLY email client on earth! Guys from ThinkDigit would know how i felt (this dude was like gx_saurav and iMav amalgamated into one life form 😛 ) Anyway, i think such sessions should not be allowed on events such as BarCamp. There was another “marketing” session by some company offering free server hosting for 3 months to budding startups (sorry, forgot their name). In the meantime, Kapil also joined us. The Vinsol team took the stage once more with Sur giving a session on “Ruby Insights – Some unsaid things about Ruby Programming Language”. Once again, the session was very informative, with him giving some tips and tricks for Ruby programming. He even gave some live demos of small code snippets. I moved from the conference room to the Networking room, where Akhil was giving a live demo of deploying rails apps on EC2. Jignesh was also there to answer our questions concerning EC2. After this, the sessions were over, and people were just interacting with each other. We clicked some pics, and then, were invited by Kapil to Ruby Tuesday for some snacks and beer, all sponsored by Opera Software! Me and Apoorv decided to accept the invite, while Deepak and Prateek decided to call it a day. We had a lot of fun (and beer 😛 ) there and interacted a lot with all present there. We were there until the very end when Navjot (representing Opera Software) paid the bill 🙂
So that was it! Now you’ve got a first hand experience of the entire event! But be sure to actually be there next time! I REALLY enjoyed the entire experience. Im now looking forward to attending such events, and ill be attending OSS CampDelhi 2 next week 🙂
Pics:
P.S. Ill be updating this post as and when i remember stuff 😛