via Sampad: Niraj Bhatnagar's presentation at Barcamp Delhi 4.
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Showing posts with label barcamp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label barcamp. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
Roundup of Barcamp Mumbai 3
Vijay and I were in Mumbai on Saturday for Barcamp Mumbai 3. I had checked the wiki the day before and there were over 600 registrations. Wow. Out of that I guess about 200-220 turned up, which is still a pretty big crowd.
There was some confusion at the start especially with the schedule board with a big crowd putting up sessions only for everything to be rearranged by track so that all startup demos go into one room and so on. Eventually by the time everything started we were running about 90 minutes late. The other problem was the wifi. I asked about five of the volunteers, but no one seemed to know the settings. I finally got the wifi configured thanks to one of the students sitting next to me.
I first headed out to the startup demo track and checked out demos of on2biz, MediaMelon and WikiSlice. on2biz is a workflow management web app. From the demo, it looked like it is targeted towards the sales cycle. MediaMelon is a video delivery network that uses p2p to deliver the videos. I would have loved to have seen a demo, but apparently the firewall was blocking the app. WikiSlice is a UI layer around wikipedia that allows you to browse topics better (grouping related pages, subtopics etc). They have also made it work with an offline wikipedia dump. My initial reaction was why anyone would want wikipedia offline, but the discussion brought up some interesting cases like rural access.
I headed out for the Firetalk track, but it seemed to have fizzled out, nothing was happening there. I went to the tech track. A talk on jQuery was going on but both the wifi and the projector were not working in this room. The laptop was connected to a computer monitor making the slides unreadable, and the lack of wifi meant that the online demos didnt work.
The next talk was on Asynchronous IO by Bhavin. This was a really good talk, and fortunately it didn't depend so much on the slides. A couple of points - having worked with async IO, it really complicates the application logic, especially state management, so thats a tradeoff that must be made. The other problem with not handling each request in its own process is that if there are any misbehaving callbacks, they can bring down the whole server. A pretty interesting talk.
Next was my session on some of the homebrew stuff that people have done on the Nintendo DS, following which was a session on Facebook API, except the speaker didn't show up, so I left the room. I spent the rest of the day floating between rooms and the lobby area.
I managed to catch bits of Aalaap's demo of linkbunch, Aditya giving a session on Startup Saturday and Aditi doing a session on the iAccelerator program for startups at IIMA.
Just as we were leaving, we met Grishma from Whirlybird Electronics. This is a company that builds measurement and control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles. Pretty cool stuff.
One thing I was quite impressed was how many people had heard about Proto. They would mostly go "Ohh you're from Proto." If you dont know what Proto is, it is a two day event that brings together the startup ecosystem - startups, investors, invited guests, industry experts etc - and gives each selected startup six minutes to pitch to the audience. The event also has a series of talks by industry experts on technology and business topics. See the agenda for the previous edition and join the Proto.in facebook page to get a better idea.
By the way, the nominations for the July edition of Proto have just opened. If you are a startup and you would like to present at Proto, head over to the nomination page and nominate your company
There was some confusion at the start especially with the schedule board with a big crowd putting up sessions only for everything to be rearranged by track so that all startup demos go into one room and so on. Eventually by the time everything started we were running about 90 minutes late. The other problem was the wifi. I asked about five of the volunteers, but no one seemed to know the settings. I finally got the wifi configured thanks to one of the students sitting next to me.
I first headed out to the startup demo track and checked out demos of on2biz, MediaMelon and WikiSlice. on2biz is a workflow management web app. From the demo, it looked like it is targeted towards the sales cycle. MediaMelon is a video delivery network that uses p2p to deliver the videos. I would have loved to have seen a demo, but apparently the firewall was blocking the app. WikiSlice is a UI layer around wikipedia that allows you to browse topics better (grouping related pages, subtopics etc). They have also made it work with an offline wikipedia dump. My initial reaction was why anyone would want wikipedia offline, but the discussion brought up some interesting cases like rural access.
I headed out for the Firetalk track, but it seemed to have fizzled out, nothing was happening there. I went to the tech track. A talk on jQuery was going on but both the wifi and the projector were not working in this room. The laptop was connected to a computer monitor making the slides unreadable, and the lack of wifi meant that the online demos didnt work.
The next talk was on Asynchronous IO by Bhavin. This was a really good talk, and fortunately it didn't depend so much on the slides. A couple of points - having worked with async IO, it really complicates the application logic, especially state management, so thats a tradeoff that must be made. The other problem with not handling each request in its own process is that if there are any misbehaving callbacks, they can bring down the whole server. A pretty interesting talk.
Next was my session on some of the homebrew stuff that people have done on the Nintendo DS, following which was a session on Facebook API, except the speaker didn't show up, so I left the room. I spent the rest of the day floating between rooms and the lobby area.
I managed to catch bits of Aalaap's demo of linkbunch, Aditya giving a session on Startup Saturday and Aditi doing a session on the iAccelerator program for startups at IIMA.
Just as we were leaving, we met Grishma from Whirlybird Electronics. This is a company that builds measurement and control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles. Pretty cool stuff.
One thing I was quite impressed was how many people had heard about Proto. They would mostly go "Ohh you're from Proto." If you dont know what Proto is, it is a two day event that brings together the startup ecosystem - startups, investors, invited guests, industry experts etc - and gives each selected startup six minutes to pitch to the audience. The event also has a series of talks by industry experts on technology and business topics. See the agenda for the previous edition and join the Proto.in facebook page to get a better idea.
By the way, the nominations for the July edition of Proto have just opened. If you are a startup and you would like to present at Proto, head over to the nomination page and nominate your company
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
BarCamp Kerala
Mani Karthik has a post on BarCamp Kerala on Daily SEO Blog
This is exciting news! The first and foremost BarCamp is going to be held in Kerala, this November 24th. It’s probably going to be hosted at the Technopark Auditorium, Trivandrum, (actually the venue is not decided yet.)It's pretty exciting to see BarCamps coming up all over the country. If you are in Trivandrum, think about dropping in - and then blogging about it afterwards :) The homepage for the event is here: BarCamp Kerala
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
The problem with voted content: Homogenisation
A couple of things occurred the past week which made me think about voted content. The first was Dharmesh Shah lamenting the loss of reddit and the second was an idea floated on the bangalore barcamp mailing list of having an event where all the talks are voted on by the audience.
Why do I think an audience voted event is a bad idea? Tyranny of the majority. Tyranny of the majority is a term applied to pure democracies where the majority can constantly out-vote the minority and therefore impose their view on the entire population (which is why there are no purely democratic countries, but lets not go there).
Lets take a simple example to see how this works. Say we have an event and 100 people turn up. 60 of them want to attend startup sessions. 40 want to attend photography sessions. There are ten speaking slots. Common sense dictates that having 6 startup sessions and 4 photography sessions is a "fair" distribution for the given audience.
But what happens when topics are put to vote? In every slot, the startup crowd can out-vote the photography crowd. Therefore when put to vote, the most likely outcome will be 10 startup sessions and no photography sessions.
But it doesn't end there. The next time the event comes up, the audience will be reinforced by those who liked it the first time around. Therefore in the second edition, there will be more startup enthusiasts in the crowd and fewer photography buffs. Over time, this positive feedback cycle will reinforce itself until the crowd and the topics become homogeneous.
This is exactly what happened to reddit for example. Topics that appealed to the majority go to the front page. As users visit the site, those who like the topics on the front page tend to stay, while those who don't will leave. Those who stay cause more such articles to get to the front page, which in turn attracts people who like those topics. A vicious positive feedback loop occurs as the crowd and the topics become homogeneous, eventually driving out minority interests.
The cool thing about a barcamp is that there is a great deal of variety in the topics. Therefore, even if you are in the minority, there is a good chance that you will find someone with your interests at the event. The biking collective was a good example of this. Such a session would never have survived a voting round. But the barcamp format meant that it was possible for those interested in the topic to meet up and have a session.
That is why I feel that efforts must be taken to preserve diversity.
Having said that, there is merit in voted sessions. Voted sessions avoid the situation where people talk about stuff that no one wants to hear about. But it makes more sense if voted sessions are just one of the tracks in the barcamp, not the whole event.
Why do I think an audience voted event is a bad idea? Tyranny of the majority. Tyranny of the majority is a term applied to pure democracies where the majority can constantly out-vote the minority and therefore impose their view on the entire population (which is why there are no purely democratic countries, but lets not go there).
Lets take a simple example to see how this works. Say we have an event and 100 people turn up. 60 of them want to attend startup sessions. 40 want to attend photography sessions. There are ten speaking slots. Common sense dictates that having 6 startup sessions and 4 photography sessions is a "fair" distribution for the given audience.
But what happens when topics are put to vote? In every slot, the startup crowd can out-vote the photography crowd. Therefore when put to vote, the most likely outcome will be 10 startup sessions and no photography sessions.
But it doesn't end there. The next time the event comes up, the audience will be reinforced by those who liked it the first time around. Therefore in the second edition, there will be more startup enthusiasts in the crowd and fewer photography buffs. Over time, this positive feedback cycle will reinforce itself until the crowd and the topics become homogeneous.
This is exactly what happened to reddit for example. Topics that appealed to the majority go to the front page. As users visit the site, those who like the topics on the front page tend to stay, while those who don't will leave. Those who stay cause more such articles to get to the front page, which in turn attracts people who like those topics. A vicious positive feedback loop occurs as the crowd and the topics become homogeneous, eventually driving out minority interests.
The cool thing about a barcamp is that there is a great deal of variety in the topics. Therefore, even if you are in the minority, there is a good chance that you will find someone with your interests at the event. The biking collective was a good example of this. Such a session would never have survived a voting round. But the barcamp format meant that it was possible for those interested in the topic to meet up and have a session.
That is why I feel that efforts must be taken to preserve diversity.
Having said that, there is merit in voted sessions. Voted sessions avoid the situation where people talk about stuff that no one wants to hear about. But it makes more sense if voted sessions are just one of the tracks in the barcamp, not the whole event.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Lightning Talks at BCB4
We decided to have a session of lightning talks at the Python hall at BCB4. A lightning talk is a quick 5 minute talk. Usually there are a number of lightning talks one after another. The idea of the lightning talk is to give a quick introduction to a topic that might be new for the audience, with the discussions taken after the session.
It went of pretty well, one of the more fun sessions. It's really nice to see ideas bouncing off every five minutes, and with Kausik keeping strict time, the session flow was good.
After seeing it work nicely at the Python hall, I converted my Speed Geeking session into a lightning talk session. The reason was that there were about 20 people in the audience, which is too small for a speed geek, but good for lightning talks.
In this post I'll summarise the topics from the two lightning talk sessions. Click the links for more information on the topic.
It went of pretty well, one of the more fun sessions. It's really nice to see ideas bouncing off every five minutes, and with Kausik keeping strict time, the session flow was good.
After seeing it work nicely at the Python hall, I converted my Speed Geeking session into a lightning talk session. The reason was that there were about 20 people in the audience, which is too small for a speed geek, but good for lightning talks.
In this post I'll summarise the topics from the two lightning talk sessions. Click the links for more information on the topic.
- Code like a Pythonista: Brad Allen from the Dallas Python User Group talked about David Goodger's tutorial, Code like a Pythonista.
- Printing badges with Python: This was my session on how I used a python script to create attendee badges for Proto.in. If you attended Proto, you would have seen those badges. They were generated using a Python script.
- Restructured Text: Restructured Text is another variant of text markup languages like Textile and Markdown. It is the standard markup language used in docstrings in Python.
- Sudoku Solver: Anand had a talk on writing a sudoku solver. Very nice little program that uses a backtracking algorithm to solve sudoku puzzles.
- pygoogle: pygoogle is a python interface to the Google web search API. This session showed how you can use it for search engine optimization.
- Web.py: Demonstation of a quick web app written using the lightweight web.py framework. Web.py powers sites like Reddit and Open Library.
- Wicket and JTrac: Peter Thomas gave a talk on his open source project, JTrac, which uses the Apache Wicket framework.
- Agile Software Development: Agile software development explained in a few minutes!
- Second Life: An intro to Second Life, with an emphasis on the Second Life economy.
- Creative Commons: An intro to the CC philosophy.
- ShowMeDo: ShowMeDo is a site for the sharing of technical material through the medium of screencasting.
- Tempostand: Tempostand is a platform for independent artists to share their music under a Creative Commons license
Saturday, August 04, 2007
SkillsCamp Pune
SkillsCamp Pune is coming up on the 18th of August. The aim of SkillsCamp is to create an open courseware focusing on technical topics. Think of it as MIT OpenCourseWare for software development. The idea is that each session will be a 15 minute workshop which will be recorded and then put online or on a DVD. It's an unconference, so participants can take a session on any topic that they want. Expect tech stuff like python, rails and so on to be recorded.
The organisation team for SkillsCamp is being led by Freeman Murray. I first met him at BCB3 when he was wearing a very nice creative commons t-shirt and then again at Proto.in and BCB4. At BCB4 he recorded a videocast while I showed him ShowMeDo, which aims to do something similar to SkillsCamp via screencasts.
It's interesting to see these initiatives for bringing in sharing of technical knowledge, especially because there is a serious shortage of good training material for a lot of newer technologies. Personally, I am a huge fan of screencasts as a wonderful medium for capturing and distributing this knowledge.
The organisation team for SkillsCamp is being led by Freeman Murray. I first met him at BCB3 when he was wearing a very nice creative commons t-shirt and then again at Proto.in and BCB4. At BCB4 he recorded a videocast while I showed him ShowMeDo, which aims to do something similar to SkillsCamp via screencasts.
It's interesting to see these initiatives for bringing in sharing of technical knowledge, especially because there is a serious shortage of good training material for a lot of newer technologies. Personally, I am a huge fan of screencasts as a wonderful medium for capturing and distributing this knowledge.
Labels:
bangalore,
barcamp,
barcampbangalore4,
bcb4,
pune,
skillscamp
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Review of BarCamp Bangalore 4
So BarCamp Bangalore 4 has come and gone. It was interesting as always. Lots of interesting people and things going on. I already wrote a post about Anand and the Open Library project and I'll be writing a few more detailed posts about the other stuff that I found interesting at BCB4. In this post however, I want to concentrate on the event itself.
Also, on the topic of BCB4 reviews, some other posts from across the blogosphere -
Another interesting innovation was the introduction of collectives. A collective is a group getting together to discuss a common topic. This was in response to the last time when a complaint was that if someone was interested in one topic it was hard to know where all it was happening. This time you could just head out to the collective venue and sit through all the collective sessions.
Now to dissect the event ;) I'll start out with the broader principles and finally come to the minor areas.
The law of two feet
To start off, one thing I liked the large number of parallel sessions. This is an area where a number of people complain - too many parallel sessions - but according to me, there needs to be way more sessions than you can possibly attend. This is because a crucial cornerstone of an unconference, borrowed from open space technology, is the law of two feet. Harrison Owen, the creator of Open Space says this about the law:
One of the things that I really enjoyed this barcamp, and thought was an improvement over last time, was the amount of stuff happening in parallel. I was able to extensively use the law of two feet to good effect and ended up in a number of good sessions.
Small groups in a circle
Another thing that I took away from Owen's writings on open space technology was the role of the circle. I've seen this validated time and time again — the best discussions happen with a small number of people facing each other in a circle. Take a look at this photo from the social tech session. I can't display it here since it is all rights reserved :( - http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=937911412&size=l
Studies have shown that the design of an interaction space has a profound effect on the types of interactions that go on there. Put people in a classroom and there is a clear divide between the presenter and the audience. The result is that you will likely get a presentation plus Q&A format, with a mostly passive audience. Put people in a small circle and you will get a completely different set of interactions.
Again for first timers, it often seems that the thing to do is to sit passively in the sessions. This often leads to confusion when a lot of interesting discussions are happening in the hallway.
I thought the classrooms at IIM are too big. I liked the rooms at Thoughtworks from BCB2. Probably the right size for having a session.
Whenever they start is the right time. When it is over, it is over.
These are two more principles of open space. Basically what it means is that a group will start when it needs to. The discussion will run its course. And then the session will end. "Run its course" could mean 5 minutes, half an hour, one hour, whatever. As long as participants are interested, the discussion is on. When the energy drops, the discussion is over and the session is closed.
The conclusion to draw from that is that it is impossible to fix an exact start and end time on a session. Some sessions start late because you are waiting for people. Some start early because there are interested people around.
I am reminded of Prayank's hands-on tutorial on flex (a detailed post on this will come later), a very nice session that was conducted in the middle of the lunch session when everyone was out eating. But there were a few people interested and the room was free, so the session was held then.
Again, sessions finish when they finish. Some discussions go on for a while. It can be a killer to cut the session short due to time constraints. Some sessions only go on for 15-20 minutes. It makes sense to move on rather than to fill the time.
I thought that the idea of encouraging sessions outside the rooms were brilliant in this regard. When the session is held on the garden or in the hallway or in coffee day, there are no time constraints and the sessions follow the principles automatically.
The paper wiki
The paper wiki just didnt work properly this time. One of the by-products of having a collectives system is that each collective had its own schedule. This is great if you plan to sit in one collective, but it was confusing if you wanted to move from room to room and wanted to see what was going on at a particular time across collectives. In the end I just went to the rooms to see what was happening instead of relying on the paper wiki. This was kind of messy and definitely one area to look at.
For instance there were a lot of corridor sessions scheduled for post lunch, 3pm on Sunday - Bikers, Photo, Speed Geeking, Python, Functional programming, and virtually nothing for 4pm. Session coordinators didn't realise this situation because there was no centralised paper wiki where you could see the timings across collectives properly.
I liked the paper wiki at BCB2. Very straightforward and everyone knew at what time a session was happening.
Dissecting the hallway discussion
The interesting thing about a hallway discussion (or any session outside the classroom for that matter) is that it follows these principles automatically. No one needs to tell anyone anything, it just happens like it is just the natural state of things. Hallway discussions are by nature limited to 10-15 people due to practical constraints. The participants are almost always in a circle facing each other. Those not interested almost always move on, and interested people join in. It is almost always participatory. And hallway discussions just start on their own and end when its over.
Amazing isn't it? Can we replicate these in planned sessions? I say yes. Hold the session outside the rooms — in the corridor, garden or coffee day or anywhere outside — and it will automatically follow the principles.
Getting the first-timer oriented
The thing about a barcamp is that it can be extremely disorienting to a first timer. Almost everything is structured in a way that is counter-intuitive to previous experience. The large number of parallel sessions, sessions that start late or early, sessions that end late or early — it can all be very disorienting.
A good paper wiki can be critical here. I also think if there are a large number of first timers, it probably makes sense to have an introductory session on 'navigating through a barcamp.'
Other minor points
An issue was that many uninterested people came along. This might be true, but it could also be a case of first timers not knowing how to get the best out of an unconference. The main thing is to get interested people into the event. I think pitching the event to the mainstream is a bad idea. Whoever is interested should come. If that is 50 people then that's okay. If that turns out to be large, then that's okay too. But it should happen organically. There need not be a deliberate focus on doing a big event. BCB is popular enough that it doesn't need to focus on publicity.
One more point that irked a lot of people was companies that did repeat sessions in the rooms because 'they didnt get enough of a response the first time.' Guys, the idea in a barcamp is to share and learn, not to use a captive audience as a focus group. I have no problems with companies showing a demo of their product. These sessions can sometimes be pretty interesting. But to do it again in the room is probably not correct. If you really, really want to do a repeat, use the corridors. Especially if there was not enough response the first time. If there was a great response then maybe its okay, but even then I'd suggest a corridor for the session.
Many complained about sessions overflowing their time. This is the problem with rooms. It's hard to apply the "when its over, its over" principle because the next session has to start. This was hardly an issue with the corridor discussions because there is always more corridor space.
Conclusion
Okay, this post is big enough already. What did I like? I liked the stuff happening in parallel and the hallway discussions. I thought the session rooms were too big and the paper wiki was very confusing. On the whole I was mostly in the hallway discussions, so it was a very good barcamp for me, though I can see how those who tried to decipher the paper wiki and plan the sessions to attend would have had a tough time.
Also, on the topic of BCB4 reviews, some other posts from across the blogosphere -
- http://latelyontime.livejournal.com/155355.html
- http://ramblings.ajaxed.net/2007/07/30/barcamp-bangalore-4-day-2/
- http://silicontryst.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/caution-demoing-product-at-barcamp/
- http://mataal.multiply.com/journal/item/42
- http://remainconnected.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-missed-day-1-of-barcamp-bangalore-4.html
Another interesting innovation was the introduction of collectives. A collective is a group getting together to discuss a common topic. This was in response to the last time when a complaint was that if someone was interested in one topic it was hard to know where all it was happening. This time you could just head out to the collective venue and sit through all the collective sessions.
Now to dissect the event ;) I'll start out with the broader principles and finally come to the minor areas.
The law of two feet
To start off, one thing I liked the large number of parallel sessions. This is an area where a number of people complain - too many parallel sessions - but according to me, there needs to be way more sessions than you can possibly attend. This is because a crucial cornerstone of an unconference, borrowed from open space technology, is the law of two feet. Harrison Owen, the creator of Open Space says this about the law:
The basic principle is that if you are not getting anything out of a session, use your two feet to move to a better session. The law can only be useful if there are enough sessions to choose from. So for the law to be successful, you need to have a lot of stuff going on. By "stuff going on," I don't mean formal sessions only. Hallway discussions and informal or ad-hoc sessions also count.This law says that every individual has two feet, and must be prepared to use them. Responsibility for a successful outcome in any Open Space Event resides with exactly one person -- each participant.
One of the things that I really enjoyed this barcamp, and thought was an improvement over last time, was the amount of stuff happening in parallel. I was able to extensively use the law of two feet to good effect and ended up in a number of good sessions.
Small groups in a circle
Another thing that I took away from Owen's writings on open space technology was the role of the circle. I've seen this validated time and time again — the best discussions happen with a small number of people facing each other in a circle. Take a look at this photo from the social tech session. I can't display it here since it is all rights reserved :( - http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=937911412&size=l
Studies have shown that the design of an interaction space has a profound effect on the types of interactions that go on there. Put people in a classroom and there is a clear divide between the presenter and the audience. The result is that you will likely get a presentation plus Q&A format, with a mostly passive audience. Put people in a small circle and you will get a completely different set of interactions.
Again for first timers, it often seems that the thing to do is to sit passively in the sessions. This often leads to confusion when a lot of interesting discussions are happening in the hallway.
I thought the classrooms at IIM are too big. I liked the rooms at Thoughtworks from BCB2. Probably the right size for having a session.
Whenever they start is the right time. When it is over, it is over.
These are two more principles of open space. Basically what it means is that a group will start when it needs to. The discussion will run its course. And then the session will end. "Run its course" could mean 5 minutes, half an hour, one hour, whatever. As long as participants are interested, the discussion is on. When the energy drops, the discussion is over and the session is closed.
The conclusion to draw from that is that it is impossible to fix an exact start and end time on a session. Some sessions start late because you are waiting for people. Some start early because there are interested people around.
I am reminded of Prayank's hands-on tutorial on flex (a detailed post on this will come later), a very nice session that was conducted in the middle of the lunch session when everyone was out eating. But there were a few people interested and the room was free, so the session was held then.
Again, sessions finish when they finish. Some discussions go on for a while. It can be a killer to cut the session short due to time constraints. Some sessions only go on for 15-20 minutes. It makes sense to move on rather than to fill the time.
I thought that the idea of encouraging sessions outside the rooms were brilliant in this regard. When the session is held on the garden or in the hallway or in coffee day, there are no time constraints and the sessions follow the principles automatically.
The paper wiki
The paper wiki just didnt work properly this time. One of the by-products of having a collectives system is that each collective had its own schedule. This is great if you plan to sit in one collective, but it was confusing if you wanted to move from room to room and wanted to see what was going on at a particular time across collectives. In the end I just went to the rooms to see what was happening instead of relying on the paper wiki. This was kind of messy and definitely one area to look at.
For instance there were a lot of corridor sessions scheduled for post lunch, 3pm on Sunday - Bikers, Photo, Speed Geeking, Python, Functional programming, and virtually nothing for 4pm. Session coordinators didn't realise this situation because there was no centralised paper wiki where you could see the timings across collectives properly.
I liked the paper wiki at BCB2. Very straightforward and everyone knew at what time a session was happening.
Dissecting the hallway discussion
The interesting thing about a hallway discussion (or any session outside the classroom for that matter) is that it follows these principles automatically. No one needs to tell anyone anything, it just happens like it is just the natural state of things. Hallway discussions are by nature limited to 10-15 people due to practical constraints. The participants are almost always in a circle facing each other. Those not interested almost always move on, and interested people join in. It is almost always participatory. And hallway discussions just start on their own and end when its over.
Amazing isn't it? Can we replicate these in planned sessions? I say yes. Hold the session outside the rooms — in the corridor, garden or coffee day or anywhere outside — and it will automatically follow the principles.
Getting the first-timer oriented
The thing about a barcamp is that it can be extremely disorienting to a first timer. Almost everything is structured in a way that is counter-intuitive to previous experience. The large number of parallel sessions, sessions that start late or early, sessions that end late or early — it can all be very disorienting.
A good paper wiki can be critical here. I also think if there are a large number of first timers, it probably makes sense to have an introductory session on 'navigating through a barcamp.'
Other minor points
An issue was that many uninterested people came along. This might be true, but it could also be a case of first timers not knowing how to get the best out of an unconference. The main thing is to get interested people into the event. I think pitching the event to the mainstream is a bad idea. Whoever is interested should come. If that is 50 people then that's okay. If that turns out to be large, then that's okay too. But it should happen organically. There need not be a deliberate focus on doing a big event. BCB is popular enough that it doesn't need to focus on publicity.
One more point that irked a lot of people was companies that did repeat sessions in the rooms because 'they didnt get enough of a response the first time.' Guys, the idea in a barcamp is to share and learn, not to use a captive audience as a focus group. I have no problems with companies showing a demo of their product. These sessions can sometimes be pretty interesting. But to do it again in the room is probably not correct. If you really, really want to do a repeat, use the corridors. Especially if there was not enough response the first time. If there was a great response then maybe its okay, but even then I'd suggest a corridor for the session.
Many complained about sessions overflowing their time. This is the problem with rooms. It's hard to apply the "when its over, its over" principle because the next session has to start. This was hardly an issue with the corridor discussions because there is always more corridor space.
Conclusion
Okay, this post is big enough already. What did I like? I liked the stuff happening in parallel and the hallway discussions. I thought the session rooms were too big and the paper wiki was very confusing. On the whole I was mostly in the hallway discussions, so it was a very good barcamp for me, though I can see how those who tried to decipher the paper wiki and plan the sessions to attend would have had a tough time.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Barcamp Bangalore 3 Roundup
I was in Bangalore on Saturday and Sunday attending the third Barcamp to be held there. Here are bits from the event that I found interesting. This is a long post, you have been warned :) Note that the following is not in chronological order.
Python Conference
I met a few guys from the BangPypers groups - Anush, Anand, Kushal, Swaroop and Sidu. Apart from the Python conversations, I also asked if anyone knew what was happening on the planned Python conference. No one had much information, so I'm not really sure whats happening. Is the Bangalore python conference going to happen?
The Knowledge Foundation
The Knowledge Foundation is the name of the group that is behind various unconferences (plus Proto.in) in Chennai. We had a discussion on how to spread the unconference movement to other cities and other non-tech settings. While Barcamps have been a big success in India, there has not been much activity outside of a few tech events like Barcamps and Mobile Mondays. TKF has been working on that in Chennai where apart from Barcamp we've had Blogcamp, Wikicamp, Proto.in and Rooftop Film Festival (that reminds me - I have to upload the RTFF photos tomorrow). Coming up are another edition of Proto, Mobile Monday and Shoot. Quite a few people were enthusiastic about having small gatherings on other such topics. It would be great to see more unconferences on a whole range of topics in various cities.
Silver Catalyst
I talked to a few thoughtworkers about Silver Catalyst - Amir, Sidu and Vivek. Amir had recorded my session and had also interviewed me at the second barcamp bangalore back in December. I also met Umesh and a couple of other guys who had also attended my session in the previous barcamp. It was interesting to see how the tool had progressed in the three months between the barcamps.
Sidu took some time out to point me towards Mingle, which is a tool developed by the new Studios division of Thoughtworks, scheduled to release in June. I wanted to discuss Silver Catalyst a bit more with Vivek, but I lost him in the crowd somewhere.
Organisational Culture
There were three sessions that I thought touched on the same topic of culture from different angles. The first was by Savita Kini on Products vs Services in Indian companies. The second was by Satish about whether soft skills training was required. The third was by Shourya on the Bambi code jam initiative at GE.
Savita pointed out a number of challenges and opportunities facing Indian companies. Shourya made a good point in the discussion asking why we think that products are superior to services. Some of the points raised were profit margin and scalability. I'm with Shourya here that I'm not convinced that products are always better than service. Profit margin depends on the product. The XBox for instance is sold at a loss. Mobile phones have very thin profit margins. Scalability is also not a great reason as it all depends on the market. If you put out a product in a small market, there may not be much scope for scalability.
In the end, I think the biggest reason that product companies are not as prevalent is because of the organisational culture. Large companies are by nature risk averse. Since there are a lot of profitable service companies, we tend to follow them and not take the risk of doing something new. One of the cool thinks about Barcamps is that it gets a lot of product startups together.
That ties in with the second talk about soft skills training in IT companies. Soft skills are certainly required. The problem arises when the training is imposed rather than sought. Sukumar made a good point that knowledge can never be given, it can only be taken. I dont think a one day training can build teams for instance.
Satish had a good point which, to me, got to the heart of the matter. Fishermen work in teams because they know that if they don't, all of them will have trouble with dinner. The result of success and failure is right in front of them. They don't need to take a training class to realise that. The problem in large organisations is that there is a disconnect between the work and the outcome. Developers who do the work cannot see the outcome of their work, either in the form of customer satisfaction or bottom line impact. Thus they associate with the closest outcome that they can see - the salary - and start working for the money instead of the company.
A startup culture is like the fisherman team. Everyone is aware of pretty much everything and they know the outcome of their work. The question is can we get a startup like culture in a medium or big company?
Which brings us to the third talk by Shourya on Bambi, a codejam initiative taken in GE. He explained how he got the idea from the Yahoo Hackday in the first Barcamp Bangalore, and implemented it in the form of a codejam at GE. He explained how there was trouble convincing the management about holding it. Finally when it was held, it produced one IP plus a number of other cool, but not so useful projects. The second time around, the management actually asked for it to be held and it was held with some changes in the format.
A codejam, 20% time to work on your own project and other such initiatives are 'cool' initiatives. The problem is that they do not have direct ROI consequences. However, the actual dynamics are a lot more complex. Such initiatives for instance may (or may not) help attract smarter programmers, or reduce attrition, or build up a specific company culture. It may fail if the current programmers are not the type to take part in such events. So the success depends on both the current culture as well as the future culture.
Another problem is that some companies don't really believe in it. Someone was talking about 20% time in their company and how you can work on what you want provided you finish the main work. Since work pretty much takes the whole time, plus a bit more, this is as good as maintaining the status quo. The point of 20% in Google is that you can spend that time even if you are working on something else. They are okay with the fact that the main work will take a bit more time. So that again points to a difference in company culture.
So how can these forces be resolved in managing the current culture or creating a new culture? Thats the big question, but the discussions were interesting.
Proto
There was a discussion on the venue for Proto. A lot of people from Bangalore wanted the next edition of Proto to be held in Bangalore. This was a completely ad-hoc session held under the trees (an ideal unconference session!). [Off-topic digression: When a projector is involved there is a clear speaker/audience divide. Get everyone sitting in a circle and it becomes a discussion with everyone pitching in their views.] Back on-topic, there was a good discussion where it was decided to have the next edition in Chennai with interested people from Bangalore joining the team, and the session after that will be in Bangalore.
Barcamp Bangalore 2 DVDs
Amir from Thoughtworks had recorded a lot of sessions from Barcamp Bangalore 2. It came to 8 DVDs in all after editing. Kesav brought his set of DVDs for us to make a copy. The problem was that it takes a long time to copy all eight. Finally, Kushal volunteered to make copies for us. Thanks Kushal!
Quake deathmatch
A few of us had a Quake deathmatch using OpenQuake on Saturday evening. Jace, Shreyas, myself and a couple of other guys were there. It's been many years since I played Quake so it was great fun. For some inexplicable reason OpenQuake would sometimes stop reading the horizontal axis of the mouse. The mouse would work fine in the menus, but in the game I could only look up and down and couldn't turn left and right. Quiting and rejoining the server fixed the problem, but the frag count went back to zero. It happened thrice in all. Highly frustrating. Absolutely no idea what caused it.
Dinners
A dinner was organised at the end of Saturday. I didn't attend it because I went to meet a few guys at the Forum. At the dinner were ex-thoughtworker and AI hacker :) Ravi Mohan, Bharat Guruprakash, Manoj Govindan, Rajesh Babu and myself. A number of interesting topics were discussed like machine learning, silver catalyst, the ongoing drama at the scrumdevelopment group that has been tragically comical, work at thoughtworks and subex, thoughts on the CSM, agile in India, applying agile to embedded systems, PhD, research, entrepreneurs, dungeons and dragons, board games and so on.
We had to catch our train on Sunday night. Ramesh Babu joined Sukumar and me for the evening. He had hosted Syed, Kiruba and Sukumar on Saturday night. Kiruba and Syed had a dinner appointment so we split up at the station. They returned 5 minutes before the train was scheduled to leave, running and sweating, and then the train left half an hour late :)
Photography
I met Mahesh Shantaram at lunch on Sunday. Mahesh is a documentary photographer based in Bangalore. He has some very nice photographs that you can see online here. Amogh had a session on conservation with stories based on his photographs. He goes into the forest every weekend to take photographs. We later caught up with him at Cafe Coffee Day after the event was over to have a discussion about the Shoot event thats coming up and also if we could join up with him on a trip sometime.
Sessions
A few quick words about the sessions that I attended.
Motvik showed a demo of their WWIGO product. They showed how to use a mobile phone as a webcam and transmit data via bluetooth to the laptop where it was streamed over skype to another person. Inactiv explained their Activ Mobs service, a group SMS service for groups of friends. There was a presentation about Bigswerve by Raj Bala. What they do is to go through the comments at various websites and generate a network based on comment patterns. Comment patterns an example of implicit networks where the network is not formally defined and a comment automatically implies a level of engagement with the site. A few thoughtworkers gave a presentation of Continuous Integration and Cruisecontrol.rb. Sowmya Karmali had a session explaining the Mifos project. Marek Tuszynski had an event on How to organise an open event. Marek was the organiser for AsiaSource and a few other events. I think it started early or I messed up the timing because I really wanted to attend but when I went there the session was just wrapping up. There was a nice session on usability by Hari and Ram.
Python Conference
I met a few guys from the BangPypers groups - Anush, Anand, Kushal, Swaroop and Sidu. Apart from the Python conversations, I also asked if anyone knew what was happening on the planned Python conference. No one had much information, so I'm not really sure whats happening. Is the Bangalore python conference going to happen?
The Knowledge Foundation
The Knowledge Foundation is the name of the group that is behind various unconferences (plus Proto.in) in Chennai. We had a discussion on how to spread the unconference movement to other cities and other non-tech settings. While Barcamps have been a big success in India, there has not been much activity outside of a few tech events like Barcamps and Mobile Mondays. TKF has been working on that in Chennai where apart from Barcamp we've had Blogcamp, Wikicamp, Proto.in and Rooftop Film Festival (that reminds me - I have to upload the RTFF photos tomorrow). Coming up are another edition of Proto, Mobile Monday and Shoot. Quite a few people were enthusiastic about having small gatherings on other such topics. It would be great to see more unconferences on a whole range of topics in various cities.
Silver Catalyst
I talked to a few thoughtworkers about Silver Catalyst - Amir, Sidu and Vivek. Amir had recorded my session and had also interviewed me at the second barcamp bangalore back in December. I also met Umesh and a couple of other guys who had also attended my session in the previous barcamp. It was interesting to see how the tool had progressed in the three months between the barcamps.
Sidu took some time out to point me towards Mingle, which is a tool developed by the new Studios division of Thoughtworks, scheduled to release in June. I wanted to discuss Silver Catalyst a bit more with Vivek, but I lost him in the crowd somewhere.
Organisational Culture
There were three sessions that I thought touched on the same topic of culture from different angles. The first was by Savita Kini on Products vs Services in Indian companies. The second was by Satish about whether soft skills training was required. The third was by Shourya on the Bambi code jam initiative at GE.
Savita pointed out a number of challenges and opportunities facing Indian companies. Shourya made a good point in the discussion asking why we think that products are superior to services. Some of the points raised were profit margin and scalability. I'm with Shourya here that I'm not convinced that products are always better than service. Profit margin depends on the product. The XBox for instance is sold at a loss. Mobile phones have very thin profit margins. Scalability is also not a great reason as it all depends on the market. If you put out a product in a small market, there may not be much scope for scalability.
In the end, I think the biggest reason that product companies are not as prevalent is because of the organisational culture. Large companies are by nature risk averse. Since there are a lot of profitable service companies, we tend to follow them and not take the risk of doing something new. One of the cool thinks about Barcamps is that it gets a lot of product startups together.
That ties in with the second talk about soft skills training in IT companies. Soft skills are certainly required. The problem arises when the training is imposed rather than sought. Sukumar made a good point that knowledge can never be given, it can only be taken. I dont think a one day training can build teams for instance.
Satish had a good point which, to me, got to the heart of the matter. Fishermen work in teams because they know that if they don't, all of them will have trouble with dinner. The result of success and failure is right in front of them. They don't need to take a training class to realise that. The problem in large organisations is that there is a disconnect between the work and the outcome. Developers who do the work cannot see the outcome of their work, either in the form of customer satisfaction or bottom line impact. Thus they associate with the closest outcome that they can see - the salary - and start working for the money instead of the company.
A startup culture is like the fisherman team. Everyone is aware of pretty much everything and they know the outcome of their work. The question is can we get a startup like culture in a medium or big company?
Which brings us to the third talk by Shourya on Bambi, a codejam initiative taken in GE. He explained how he got the idea from the Yahoo Hackday in the first Barcamp Bangalore, and implemented it in the form of a codejam at GE. He explained how there was trouble convincing the management about holding it. Finally when it was held, it produced one IP plus a number of other cool, but not so useful projects. The second time around, the management actually asked for it to be held and it was held with some changes in the format.
A codejam, 20% time to work on your own project and other such initiatives are 'cool' initiatives. The problem is that they do not have direct ROI consequences. However, the actual dynamics are a lot more complex. Such initiatives for instance may (or may not) help attract smarter programmers, or reduce attrition, or build up a specific company culture. It may fail if the current programmers are not the type to take part in such events. So the success depends on both the current culture as well as the future culture.
Another problem is that some companies don't really believe in it. Someone was talking about 20% time in their company and how you can work on what you want provided you finish the main work. Since work pretty much takes the whole time, plus a bit more, this is as good as maintaining the status quo. The point of 20% in Google is that you can spend that time even if you are working on something else. They are okay with the fact that the main work will take a bit more time. So that again points to a difference in company culture.
So how can these forces be resolved in managing the current culture or creating a new culture? Thats the big question, but the discussions were interesting.
Proto
There was a discussion on the venue for Proto. A lot of people from Bangalore wanted the next edition of Proto to be held in Bangalore. This was a completely ad-hoc session held under the trees (an ideal unconference session!). [Off-topic digression: When a projector is involved there is a clear speaker/audience divide. Get everyone sitting in a circle and it becomes a discussion with everyone pitching in their views.] Back on-topic, there was a good discussion where it was decided to have the next edition in Chennai with interested people from Bangalore joining the team, and the session after that will be in Bangalore.
Barcamp Bangalore 2 DVDs
Amir from Thoughtworks had recorded a lot of sessions from Barcamp Bangalore 2. It came to 8 DVDs in all after editing. Kesav brought his set of DVDs for us to make a copy. The problem was that it takes a long time to copy all eight. Finally, Kushal volunteered to make copies for us. Thanks Kushal!
Quake deathmatch
A few of us had a Quake deathmatch using OpenQuake on Saturday evening. Jace, Shreyas, myself and a couple of other guys were there. It's been many years since I played Quake so it was great fun. For some inexplicable reason OpenQuake would sometimes stop reading the horizontal axis of the mouse. The mouse would work fine in the menus, but in the game I could only look up and down and couldn't turn left and right. Quiting and rejoining the server fixed the problem, but the frag count went back to zero. It happened thrice in all. Highly frustrating. Absolutely no idea what caused it.
Dinners
A dinner was organised at the end of Saturday. I didn't attend it because I went to meet a few guys at the Forum. At the dinner were ex-thoughtworker and AI hacker :) Ravi Mohan, Bharat Guruprakash, Manoj Govindan, Rajesh Babu and myself. A number of interesting topics were discussed like machine learning, silver catalyst, the ongoing drama at the scrumdevelopment group that has been tragically comical, work at thoughtworks and subex, thoughts on the CSM, agile in India, applying agile to embedded systems, PhD, research, entrepreneurs, dungeons and dragons, board games and so on.
We had to catch our train on Sunday night. Ramesh Babu joined Sukumar and me for the evening. He had hosted Syed, Kiruba and Sukumar on Saturday night. Kiruba and Syed had a dinner appointment so we split up at the station. They returned 5 minutes before the train was scheduled to leave, running and sweating, and then the train left half an hour late :)
Photography
I met Mahesh Shantaram at lunch on Sunday. Mahesh is a documentary photographer based in Bangalore. He has some very nice photographs that you can see online here. Amogh had a session on conservation with stories based on his photographs. He goes into the forest every weekend to take photographs. We later caught up with him at Cafe Coffee Day after the event was over to have a discussion about the Shoot event thats coming up and also if we could join up with him on a trip sometime.
Sessions
A few quick words about the sessions that I attended.
Motvik showed a demo of their WWIGO product. They showed how to use a mobile phone as a webcam and transmit data via bluetooth to the laptop where it was streamed over skype to another person. Inactiv explained their Activ Mobs service, a group SMS service for groups of friends. There was a presentation about Bigswerve by Raj Bala. What they do is to go through the comments at various websites and generate a network based on comment patterns. Comment patterns an example of implicit networks where the network is not formally defined and a comment automatically implies a level of engagement with the site. A few thoughtworkers gave a presentation of Continuous Integration and Cruisecontrol.rb. Sowmya Karmali had a session explaining the Mifos project. Marek Tuszynski had an event on How to organise an open event. Marek was the organiser for AsiaSource and a few other events. I think it started early or I messed up the timing because I really wanted to attend but when I went there the session was just wrapping up. There was a nice session on usability by Hari and Ram.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Bangalore Barcamp 3
I'm off to Bangalore this evening to attend the third barcamp at bangalore. I'm hoping for some good discussion and meet up with interesting people. I'll post a roundup of the event when I get back on Monday.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Upcoming conferences
There are a lot of conferences (and unconferences) coming up in the next few months. The calendar is pretty packed. Here are some that I'm keeping track of, in order of the dates:
- wikicamp.in (25 Feb): For a start, wikicamp.in is happening this Sunday. It looks to be very interesting, with almost 300 participants signed up including the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. Also check out the Speaker list, and add your name if you are interested in giving a talk. And don't forget to join the mailing list for announcements.
- FOSS @ NIT Calicut (2-4 Mar): There is a FOSS conference coming up at NIT Calicut on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of March. More information on the FCI Wikia
- ChennaiPy workshop (17 Mar): The next gathering of the ChennaiPy group will be a workshop on the more advanced Python concepts. It will be in Chennai on the 17th of March (Sunday). Take a look at the ChennaiPy wiki to attend or give a talk. I'll be giving an introduction to decorators, and will be touching on my blog post, “Using Python decorators to implement guards.” If you are interested in Python and are in Chennai, do drop by. If you would like to talk about something in Python, go ahead and add the topic to the wiki.
- Bangalore Barcamp 3 (tentatively Mar): Planning has started for the third edition of the Bangalore Barcamp. If you are interested in organising or attending, I suggest joining the bangalore_barcamp mailing list. Take a look at the call for organisers here.
- Python Conference (tentatively April): There are plans for a first Python conference in India. Again, join the BangPypers list to keep track of this. If you would like to help out in organising, reply to this thread.
- Agile India 2007 (tentatively July): If you are interested in agile software development, then look out for Agile India 2007. Planning has started, check out the call for organisers on the mailing list.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Rapid Web App Development — My experiences while developing Catalyst
My talk at the barcamp was titled "Rapid Web App Development — My experiences while developing Catalyst". Catayst is the name of my project management tool. The presentation was created using a modified version of Eric Meyer's S5 presentation tool. The template allows you to create the presentation content in XHTML and style it using CSS. It's really awesome, and I feel a lot more comfortable with it than Powerpoint or OpenOffice. However, there is no place to upload it. Another problem of putting the slides online is that it lacks the voice over and discussion that actually took place. Since the slides by themselves are pretty meaningless, I've added some commentary below.
The goal: Write a web application with one person, one month of work to get to version one. That's what I'm trying to do with Catalyst. I've spent about 80 hours working part time on Catalyst. At that time, it was only a hobby project for me to learn Django, and AJAX. I've worked about 100 hours on it full time since I returned to India. I'm hoping to get to beta before the end of the year.
Catalyst is a project management tool for small, agile and distributed teams. If you have ever been frustrated with the lack of visibility into what everyone else is doing in the project, especially with multiple offices, then Catalyst is for you. But this presentation is not about Catalyst. It is about what I have learnt while attempting to develop an application in a month.
There are six points that I want to discuss, split into two areas. The first area is the philosophy, and the first point is that constraints are good.
Second is the 'less is more' philosophy. There are two angles to this. The first is that the fewer requirements you have, the less you have to design, code and test. In that sense, it obviously help you finish faster and get the product out. The other way of looking at it is simplicity. If you look at Catalyst, it does not have an integrated bug tracking system like many project management systems. Why? By eliminating bug tracking from the list of features, I retain the focus on project management. Not only does it simplify Catalyst, but the users can continue to use their favourite bug tracking tool. In my opinion, this combination is actually worth more than having integrated bug tracking within Catalyst.
The second area I want to focus on is execution. This is the actual development part. How do you speed it up? My favourite is the combination of expressive languages and powerful frameworks. Catalyst is written in python and django. Here is an example: In the project dashboard screen, we need to get all the tasks that are a part of the interation that is currently in progress. The python code to do this is just six lines, with no SQL to be written!
The fifth point is to do smart testing.
Finally, use libraries! The less code you have to write, the easier it is. Catalyst uses Dojo and Mochikit on the client side. Dojo has a bunch of widgets that really ease development, while Mochikit has a really cool DOM creation API. Catalyst uses both. PIL is used on the server side to generate charts. Apart from this, a lot of repeated code has been refactored into libraries. This is general good practise of course, but its often not done. See how the constraints force you to develop better?
To summarise, here are the six points again
The goal: Write a web application with one person, one month of work to get to version one. That's what I'm trying to do with Catalyst. I've spent about 80 hours working part time on Catalyst. At that time, it was only a hobby project for me to learn Django, and AJAX. I've worked about 100 hours on it full time since I returned to India. I'm hoping to get to beta before the end of the year.
Catalyst is a project management tool for small, agile and distributed teams. If you have ever been frustrated with the lack of visibility into what everyone else is doing in the project, especially with multiple offices, then Catalyst is for you. But this presentation is not about Catalyst. It is about what I have learnt while attempting to develop an application in a month.
There are six points that I want to discuss, split into two areas. The first area is the philosophy, and the first point is that constraints are good.
Most of us think of constraints as bad, something that limits our freedom, but constraints can be good. Take the example of the one month limit, an arbitrary constraint. Why develop version 1 in a month? Why not six months or a year? I could have chosen a year and done a lot more features, but the one month constraint forces me to select the most important features and implement them first. In this case, the constraint helps me to focus on what is essential. Constraints can also drive innovation and spur creativity.The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution — Igor Stravinsky
Second is the 'less is more' philosophy. There are two angles to this. The first is that the fewer requirements you have, the less you have to design, code and test. In that sense, it obviously help you finish faster and get the product out. The other way of looking at it is simplicity. If you look at Catalyst, it does not have an integrated bug tracking system like many project management systems. Why? By eliminating bug tracking from the list of features, I retain the focus on project management. Not only does it simplify Catalyst, but the users can continue to use their favourite bug tracking tool. In my opinion, this combination is actually worth more than having integrated bug tracking within Catalyst.
The second area I want to focus on is execution. This is the actual development part. How do you speed it up? My favourite is the combination of expressive languages and powerful frameworks. Catalyst is written in python and django. Here is an example: In the project dashboard screen, we need to get all the tasks that are a part of the interation that is currently in progress. The python code to do this is just six lines, with no SQL to be written!
The fifth point is to do smart testing.
You'll never write error free code and since there is only one person, you have to rely on automated tests. Javascript code is unit tested using jsUnit. I am looking to start using the Django extensions to python's unittest module for testing the server side code. Another tool I want to learn is Selenium for automated system tests. Of course manual tests have their place too. I am using catalyst to manage my development work, so that kind of dogfooding helps in areas like usability and finding bugs via basic exploratory testing.There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works. — Alan Perlis
Finally, use libraries! The less code you have to write, the easier it is. Catalyst uses Dojo and Mochikit on the client side. Dojo has a bunch of widgets that really ease development, while Mochikit has a really cool DOM creation API. Catalyst uses both. PIL is used on the server side to generate charts. Apart from this, a lot of repeated code has been refactored into libraries. This is general good practise of course, but its often not done. See how the constraints force you to develop better?
To summarise, here are the six points again
- Constraints are good
- Less is more
- Expressive languages
- Powerful frameworks
- Smart testing
- Libraries
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Bangalore Barcamp 2 Roundup
Here is a roundup of some of the events during the barcamp. There was so much stuff going on that there were quite a few times when I wanted to be in two or three places at the same time, and ended up missing some interesting stuff.
The first presentation was by Sandeep Singhal from Sequoia Capital. He talked about what they look for in the companies in which they invest, and proceeded to give ten points that they look for — addressing large markets, good team DNA, clarity of purpose, rich customers, insane customer focus, they are pain killers, think differently, agility, frugality and they disrupt the market.
It seems to me that VCs are pretty interested in investing. On the second day, Kiruba had a session on Proto.in. I had mentioned Proto.in previously in my blog, and its coming up next month in Chennai. It's a chance for entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to a group of VCs in ten minutes by showing a demo/prototype.
There were a couple of talks on social entrepreneurship as well. These were based on Dr.C.K.Prahalad's book, "The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid". Harinath Pudipeddi discussed social entrepreneurship in the healthcare industry, while Siva Prasad spoke about microfinance.
By the way, there is a business plan competition for social entrepreneurship called Genesis which is being conducted by IIT Madras, MIT and a few others. The contest takes place through Jan and Feb. The schedule is available on the website.
Jonathan Boutelle had an interesting session on how they scaled Slideshare. Slideshare is a place where you can upload presentations and they share them, embed them in blogs and so on. It's positioned as YouTube for Powerpoint, and the whole thing was done using Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3.
It was done with just a few people (less than 10) in Delhi in six months. Another cool thing is that they serve the flash content directly from S3. This means that if there is a huge spike in viewing presentations, all that traffic is handled by Amazon. In fact, even if the slideshare site goes down, you can still view presentations embedded in blogs, because they come straight from Amazon.
A theme that I noticed was that there were quite a few companies using Amazon services. It was something that I didn't expect. Apparently, a number of photo sharing sites use the S3 service to store their data. I met Manish from Picsquare and he said that they stored all their high-res photos on S3. He also mentioned that some other companies kept their data backups on S3! I had no idea that Amazon services were so popular.
Aditya Mishra from TCS had a session on innovation in large IT services company, where he made an interesting point about what innovation means for a services company. After all, someone else gives the requirements, and you deliver for those requirements, so what does it mean to be innovative? He gave a number of examples where TCS has been innovative with business models and development processes. He made a point that the entire outsourcing industry is a result of TCS innovation in succeeding with outsourcing in the 1970s when no one believed that such a thing could be done.
There were a couple of discussions that I had about Agile. Marco Janson from Thoughtworks had an introductory session on Agile, but I also had some interesting coversations with a lot of people from thoughtworks, as well as Sowmya from Aditi. There were some more sessions on agile, mostly by various people from thoughtworks.
There were a few Python related sessions. I attended one by Anand Chitipothu on web.py. One of the interesting things was that Anand is doing a rewrite of Infogami. web.py was initially written by Aaron Swartz for Infogami.
Aashish Solanki had a session on his new site YBangalore.com, which is a site to have user generated content about Bangalore. There were a number of other sessions on other sites that have been developed or are in beta. I didn't attend many sessions on Day 2, as I was in the corridor discussions that were taking place. As a result I missed many sessions.
Another session from Day 1 was Jay Fichialos talking about how they implemented HackDay at Sabre. Sabre is the company that owns travelocity and a number of travel and hotel related sites. Jay got the idea for HackDay after talking to Chad Dickerson at the first Bangalore Barcamp. Chad had just finished the HackDay for Yahoo at that point. Jay then implemented HackDay at Sabre and it was a huge success.
Taylor Cowan, also from Sabre had a session on an experiment he is doing with Sabre Labs. Sabre has huge databases of information on hotels availability, car rentals, airports, flights and so on. The idea is to make all this data available via an open REST API. Once the API is released, developers will be able to take this data and create their own mashups. This is very exciting. The whole thing will launch at opencontenttravel.com sometime in mid-Jan.
Another interesting discussion was with Jace, Shreyas, Amit Pande and Harish about Bangalore culture and sociology.
Shreyas also had a presentation on RadioVerve, a site that presents streaming music of independent indian music. You should check it out.
I also met Manoj Govindan and Ravi Mohan in a discussion on cellphones, dungeons and dragons, and wargaming. I last met Ravi back at Agile India 2005.
Finally, I gave a presentation on the stuff that I'm currently working on. I'll elaborate more on this in the next post.
A big thanks to the organisers and sponsors who did an awesome job in setting up this barcamp!
The first presentation was by Sandeep Singhal from Sequoia Capital. He talked about what they look for in the companies in which they invest, and proceeded to give ten points that they look for — addressing large markets, good team DNA, clarity of purpose, rich customers, insane customer focus, they are pain killers, think differently, agility, frugality and they disrupt the market.
It seems to me that VCs are pretty interested in investing. On the second day, Kiruba had a session on Proto.in. I had mentioned Proto.in previously in my blog, and its coming up next month in Chennai. It's a chance for entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to a group of VCs in ten minutes by showing a demo/prototype.
There were a couple of talks on social entrepreneurship as well. These were based on Dr.C.K.Prahalad's book, "The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid". Harinath Pudipeddi discussed social entrepreneurship in the healthcare industry, while Siva Prasad spoke about microfinance.
By the way, there is a business plan competition for social entrepreneurship called Genesis which is being conducted by IIT Madras, MIT and a few others. The contest takes place through Jan and Feb. The schedule is available on the website.
Jonathan Boutelle had an interesting session on how they scaled Slideshare. Slideshare is a place where you can upload presentations and they share them, embed them in blogs and so on. It's positioned as YouTube for Powerpoint, and the whole thing was done using Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3.
It was done with just a few people (less than 10) in Delhi in six months. Another cool thing is that they serve the flash content directly from S3. This means that if there is a huge spike in viewing presentations, all that traffic is handled by Amazon. In fact, even if the slideshare site goes down, you can still view presentations embedded in blogs, because they come straight from Amazon.
A theme that I noticed was that there were quite a few companies using Amazon services. It was something that I didn't expect. Apparently, a number of photo sharing sites use the S3 service to store their data. I met Manish from Picsquare and he said that they stored all their high-res photos on S3. He also mentioned that some other companies kept their data backups on S3! I had no idea that Amazon services were so popular.
Aditya Mishra from TCS had a session on innovation in large IT services company, where he made an interesting point about what innovation means for a services company. After all, someone else gives the requirements, and you deliver for those requirements, so what does it mean to be innovative? He gave a number of examples where TCS has been innovative with business models and development processes. He made a point that the entire outsourcing industry is a result of TCS innovation in succeeding with outsourcing in the 1970s when no one believed that such a thing could be done.
There were a couple of discussions that I had about Agile. Marco Janson from Thoughtworks had an introductory session on Agile, but I also had some interesting coversations with a lot of people from thoughtworks, as well as Sowmya from Aditi. There were some more sessions on agile, mostly by various people from thoughtworks.
There were a few Python related sessions. I attended one by Anand Chitipothu on web.py. One of the interesting things was that Anand is doing a rewrite of Infogami. web.py was initially written by Aaron Swartz for Infogami.
Aashish Solanki had a session on his new site YBangalore.com, which is a site to have user generated content about Bangalore. There were a number of other sessions on other sites that have been developed or are in beta. I didn't attend many sessions on Day 2, as I was in the corridor discussions that were taking place. As a result I missed many sessions.
Another session from Day 1 was Jay Fichialos talking about how they implemented HackDay at Sabre. Sabre is the company that owns travelocity and a number of travel and hotel related sites. Jay got the idea for HackDay after talking to Chad Dickerson at the first Bangalore Barcamp. Chad had just finished the HackDay for Yahoo at that point. Jay then implemented HackDay at Sabre and it was a huge success.
Taylor Cowan, also from Sabre had a session on an experiment he is doing with Sabre Labs. Sabre has huge databases of information on hotels availability, car rentals, airports, flights and so on. The idea is to make all this data available via an open REST API. Once the API is released, developers will be able to take this data and create their own mashups. This is very exciting. The whole thing will launch at opencontenttravel.com sometime in mid-Jan.
Another interesting discussion was with Jace, Shreyas, Amit Pande and Harish about Bangalore culture and sociology.
Shreyas also had a presentation on RadioVerve, a site that presents streaming music of independent indian music. You should check it out.
I also met Manoj Govindan and Ravi Mohan in a discussion on cellphones, dungeons and dragons, and wargaming. I last met Ravi back at Agile India 2005.
Finally, I gave a presentation on the stuff that I'm currently working on. I'll elaborate more on this in the next post.
A big thanks to the organisers and sponsors who did an awesome job in setting up this barcamp!
Back from barcamp
Returned from Bangalore today. I was there over the weekend to attend the second Bangalore Barcamp (my first). It was really cool. Lots of interesting sessions, lots of interesting people. Expanded post coming up tomorrow.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
BarCampDelhi
BarCampDelhi looks like it's going to be great. Gaurav has more about it here and here. Too bad I can't attend due to some really important releases coming up.
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