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

Why doesn't Django find my unit tests?

I ran into a Django gotcha today. I had an app for which it was simply not running the unit tests. The tests were there in the correct location. Django was correctly running the tests for all the other apps. Why was it not running the tests for this one? I checked settings.py to see if the app was in INSTALLED_APPS. It was. It worked fine through the browser, and the test code looked good. What was worse, it was working when I last ran it before the weekend. Why did it suddenly stop running?

I got my answer after some digging around in the Django source. It appears that you must have models.py in the app for tests to run. It so happened that this app has no models, only some views that do some calculations. Since models.py was empty, I had deleted it and didn't think too much about it. Whoops! The tests stopped running.

Once I had that figured out, the solution was simple - recreate the empty models.py, and the tests started running again.

This whole thing is really unintuitive though. Who would have thought that removing an empty file would cause the tests to stop running? There doesn't seem to be any connection between them at all.

In a broader sense, any piece of code that uses django.db.models.get_apps to get a list of installed apps is likely to run into this problem. Don't be surprised if you remove an empty models.py and then something breaks and you are left scratching your head as to what exactly happened.

This is exactly the kind of unintuitive "magic" that we Pythonistas hate :) Explicit is better than implicit etc.

What I don't understand is that the list of installed apps *IS* explicit. It's sitting there called INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py. Why does Django go about hunting through the models when it could just read this value? Any clues?

Has Django reached the tipping point?

Antonio Cangiano thinks so. The numbers used to come to this conclusion are not exactly scientific, but there's no doubt that Django is getting bigger (and better) everyday.

Tracking upcoming community tech/startup events in India

If you've been reading this blog via an RSS reader, you might not have noticed a new addition to the blog sidebar. With the number of unconferences and community tech & startup events rapidly increasing over the last year, it's been getting harder and harder to keep track of what is happening.

A few weeks ago, I created a widget to pull in the RSS feed for the upcoming unconference and tech/startup community events in India. If you visit the blog and then scroll down the right sidebar, you'll see this widget with a list of upcoming events.

The cool thing about the widget is that its sharable. If you click the "Options" menu below the widget, you'll get options to share it in a number of ways. If you would like to put this widget on your blog, click HTML and copy and paste the code onto your blog. You can also put it on a whole number of social networking sites. There is even an option to put it on your desktop as a gadget (you'll need to download some software though).

So much for sharing the list of events. How can you get an event onto this list? Good question. These are the steps -

1. First, you'll need an account at Upcoming. If you have a yahoo account that should do
2. Next, join the group India Unconferences and Events. This is the group that tracks the events
3. Third, create the event on Upcoming
4. Once the event is created, you can assign it to the group by clicking the "Send to group?" link on the right sidebar of the event page
5. Once you have tagged the event in the above manner, it will be picked up by the widget and displayed wherever the widget has been shared (pretty cool no?)

So, hopefully you'll no longer have a situation where you learn about an event only after reading the post-event coverage :)

Ultimate Frisbee in India

Anand has created a cool new website for Ultimate Frisbee in India: http://www.ultimatefrisbee.org.in/

Apart from that, here are some regional websites:

• Chennai: http://chennaiultimatefrisbee.com/
• Ahmedabad: http://ultimate.indicorps.org/
• Delhi: http://groups.google.com/group/delhi-ultimate

Plus, there are a couple of groups on Facebook:

• India Ultimate Frisbee
• Ultimate Frisbee India

MoMo is back in 2008

The first Mobile Monday meet in Chennai for 2008 kicks off on the coming Saturday, 16th Feb.

What?

MoMo Chennai Feb 2008

When?

2 PM to 5 PM, 16th Feb (Saturday)

Where?

Gandhi Nagar Club, Adyar, Chennai (Map)

Talks

1. Going to market with Nokia - Find out how - Prakash Sayini , Developers Relations ,Forum Nokia
2. Getting started with WRT (Web Run Time) development on S60 - Balagopal K.S, Technology Expert, Forum Nokia India Team
3. Building Standards compliant mobile sites for free with mobiSitesgalore - Prashanth , Akmin

If you would like to attend, add your name here. Find the official announcement here.

Screencast on many to many relationships between Django models

My third introductory screencast for Django. It follows on from the first screencast and the second one.

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

This video originally comes from here at ShowMeDo from the Python category.

NEN organising E-Week in India

NEN is an organization that promotes entrepreneurship among college students. One of their initiatives is the E-Week (Entrepreneurship week) where colleges conduct activities related to entrepreneurship. This week, 2nd Feb to 9th Feb is E-Week this year and as a part of the E-Week, a few students joined us at the Chennai OpenCoffee Club's Feb meet on Sunday. The idea was to connect students who might be thinking of starting up with entrepreneur groups in Chennai. Also as a part of E-Week, Kausik invited me to give a talk on "Bootstrapping Your Startup" at his college.

Here is a photo of Vaidhy discussing with the students at the chennai opencoffee club:

Day 1 Photos from Proto.in

There are tons of photos from the just concluded Proto.in. Here are a few photos from Day 1 of the event.


Ravi Narayan of Mentor Partners talks about "The Role of a Mentor in a Startup"


Roopa Doraiswamy on legal issues for startups


Vishal Gondal (Indiagames)


Rajiv Dingra of WATBlog and WATShow


Alok Kejriwal (games2win.com)


Bijoy Singhal (Microsoft)


Me :P


Gaurabh Mathure on the role of design


Chintan Mehta (Yahoo!)


Sujai Karampuri of Sloka Telecom (Incidentally, Sloka presented at the very first Proto.in)


Laura Parkin (NEN)


Atul Chitnis


Surojit Niyogi on writing Facebook apps


Mohanjit Jolly of DFJ on bootstrapping a startup


Samir Sood (Google M&A)

DEMO live blog and other interesting articles

If you've been following Proto.in, you might know that the initial inspiration came from the DEMO conference in the US. Well, DEMO is going on right now and it's interesting to follow the conference and see how everything happens there. So, if you are interested, check out these links

• Homepage for DEMO
• Day 1 live blogging from the conference
• DEMO Diary: Follow a company as it prepares to present at DEMO
• Videos of past presentations (For those who say that six minutes at Proto.in is too short, take a look at these videos)
• Some interesting tech from DEMO '08

Coverage of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club

Chennai OpenCoffee Club has been profiled in an article on Hindustan Times' Mint business paper. Titled 'Entrepreneur meets turning Chennai into start-up hot spot,' it gives a nice overview of what has been happening in Chennai the last year.

On a related note, the Chennai OpenCoffee Club completed six months after the January meetup. It's hard to think that its half a year already. Time flies. The next meetup is on the Sunday coming up, the 3rd of February. The website has more details and a map.

A whole bunch of events are coming up

Now that Proto.in is over, what next? I was checking out the list of upcoming events and February is quite packed.

To start with, FossConf Chennai takes place from 1st to 3rd of February. Take a look at the talks that have been lined up.

The next meeting of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club also takes place on the 3rd of February at Amethyst.

The weekend after that sees DevCamp at Bangalore. DevCamp was started after frustration that the Bangalore BarCamp is becoming less technical these days. So DevCamp will probably be a hardcore tech unconference. No "intro to xyz" talks here. Speakers can assume the audience has a sufficiently deep tech background and style their talks accordingly. Oh, and Martin Fowler will be attending as well.

Later in February is WebCamp in Chennai. This camp will discuss different web frameworks. I'll probably give a talk on Django. The hover.in guys are working in Erlang, so I expect that they will talk on writing web apps in Erlang. Expect a session on RoR from Vamsee or the RailsFactory guys. The dates are not finalised yet, but I'm hoping that this happens on the weekend of 15th.

(Hint: An easy way to keep track of community tech events happening in India is to join the India Unconferences and Events group on Upcoming)

Proto.in 2008 roundup

So another edition of Proto.in comes to a close. This edition of Proto.in is special because it's going to be the last one in Chennai. The next edition will take place in Delhi (or maybe Mumbai) in July later this year. Since the event will be moving out of Chennai, there will be a new set of volunteers based out of Delhi/Mumbai to take this event forward.

Now that Proto.in is done, what is everyone saying about it? In this post, I'll collect various posts on the event from around the blogosphere.

To start with, head over to ReviewSaurus. Mayank, who writes the blog has reviewed a bunch of presentations with videos. So far, reviews of The Viewspaper, Antya, At One Place, Instablogs, Hover.in and Deskaway have been posted.

Next, Rajiv and friends over at WATBlog cover a number of talks from Day 1 of the event. Take a look at the overview of talks by Samir Sood, Atul Chitnis, Rajesh Jain ( and another one), and Surojit Niyogi.

Gaurabh Mathure gave a talk on Day 1 titled "Sexy. Trendy. Design. Technology." Read about his experience in this blog post.

Sujai of Sloka, one of the companies at the first Proto.in (and selected for this year's Headstart) came back to give a talk on Day 1 about how unglamorous a startup really is. In this post, he gives his views on events like Proto.in and Headstart.

Leonard Badi from Mundial Communications (a South African startup) was one of the presenters this time. He has a blog post on his product to follow up from the presentation at the event.

Another presenting company perspective, Arun of Hover.in, a company that presented this time, gives his take on the event. He's also got Vijay's "The One Percent" presentation on his blog.

Coming to the audience reactions, Vamsee has some hard criticism of the event, saying that it has lost community focus and is charging too much (i.e. become too commercial). Well we did have many long discussions on how much to charge while planning the event, and ultimately it comes down to whether the companies are getting the value for which they are paying. Finances are extremely tricky to manage for an event like Proto.in, and we constantly have to balance sponsorships and entry fees to make the event viable.

Dorai gives his views on the event in this post, saying that it was difficult not to get infected by the enthusiasm and optimism.

Soham Das has blogged about Day 1 at Proto.in and Day 2 at Proto.in.

Srinivasan, a blogger who came by bus all the way from Cuddalore to attend Proto.in takes us through the event in pictures.

Finally, here are some photos of the event put up by various people. Srinivasan's blog post has a lot of photos in it. Apart from that, Swami has put up some photos here and Vijay has uploaded more pics here.

10 days to Proto.in

The third edition of Proto.in is almost here. Just 10 days to go. If you've been planning to attend, register fast before it closes. The agenda for the event has also been released (Download the agenda here).

The agenda is roughly modeled on the previous Proto.in event.

On Day 1 (thats the 18th), we have two tracks of talks. One track covers business and the other technology. Take a look at the agenda, because the talks look very interesting indeed. As usual, its going to be tough choosing which talks to attend.

Then move on to Day 2 (the 19th) for the core event. The twenty startups that have been selected will come on stage to present their products, followed by an open networking session.

If you attended Proto.in last time, then you already know why you should attend this time as well. If you haven't attended Proto.in before, then now is the chance to come and see what it is all about. You can register for the event here.

PipesCamp features on Y! Developer Network Blog

So I get back from vacation and what do I find? Y! Developer Network has featured PipesCamp on their blog. Super cool!