Github and Webfaction rock

Just wanted to chip in and say that Github rocks. And also Webfaction.

India Unconferences and Events

Chennai OCC isn't the only thing to turn one year old this month. India Unconferences and Events, a group to track unconferences and community events in India also turns one.

Over the last year, the number of community events has increased by leaps and bounds. There is an event happening somewhere almost every week. Unfortunately, it isn't always easy to track these events. Often, you only find out about the event when someone blogs about it after it's over :(

Thats where the India Unconferences and Events group helps. This group tracks tech and startup community events happening around the country. Over the last year, this group has tracked more than 120 events around the country (check out current events and past events tracked by the group)

Once you join this group (you just need a Yahoo ID to sign up), you can subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified of events as they are added. It's an open group, so if you come across a tech community event that is not in the group, you can add it to the group.

The problem with ebooks

The problem with ebooks is that its too easy to lose them. I recently bought an ebook, and now I have no idea in which directly I put it and I can't find it. Rather more difficult to lose a paper book. How do you solve this problem? Do you keep burning ebooks to a CD after you buy them? Give me some ideas.

From Good To Great ... To Below Average

There is an interesting post on the Freakonomics blog titled From Good to Great … to Below Average. The post talks about how many of the companies profiled in the book are not all that spectacular today.

Ironically, I began reading the book on the very same day that one of the eleven “good to great” companies, Fannie Mae, made the headlines of the business pages. It looks like Fannie Mae is going to need to be bailed out by the federal government. If you had bought Fannie Mae stock around the time Good to Great was published, you would have lost over 80 percent of your initial investment.

And at the end:

What does this all mean? In one sense, not much.

These business books are mostly backward-looking: what have companies done that has made them successful? The future is always hard to predict, and understanding the past is valuable; on the other hand, the implicit message of these business books is that the principles that these companies use not only have made them good in the past, but position them for continued success.

Read the whole post here.

Designing Sustainable Startups

via Sampad: Niraj Bhatnagar's presentation at Barcamp Delhi 4.

Designing Sustainable Startups

view presentation (tags: entrepreneurship sustainable business social)

Funny gmail bug

Spotted this in my Inbox today. Although it says -64 mails, all the mails are there, so I suppose its kind of a harmless bug.

Chennai OpenCoffee Club Turns One!

It's hard to believe but the Chennai OpenCoffee Club will soon turn 1 year old. Vaidhy and I started it with the first meetup on the 5th of August, 2007 at Subway (Read about it here). Since then, OCC has spread out to Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi, Noida and Kolkata (See the links at the bottom of this post to join these OCC groups).

What is the Chennai OpenCoffee Club?

Here's the blurb from the website

The Chennai OpenCoffee Club is a place for people involved in the startup ecosystem to meet in an informal setting. Anyone involved with startups - entrepreneurs, developers, lawyers, investors - is invited to come and join the conversation.

Chennai OpenCoffee Club Links

• Chennai OpenCoffee Club Online
• The original announcement
• How to organise an OpenCoffee Club in your city

Media Coverage

• Indian Express covers the first Chennai OCC meet
• Chennai OCC is featured in a Mint article covering the startup scene in Chennai
• April meet of Chennai OCC featured on Mint
• June meet of Chennai OCC featured on Mint
• Chennai OCC featured in Times of India
• Chennai OCC featured in Ergo (PDF version here, Page 2)
• Chennai OCC in Hindu Business Line

OpenCoffee Clubs In Other Cities

If you are from another city or traveling, you might want to catch up with one of these other OpenCoffee Clubs

• Worldwide OCC website
• Bangalore OpenCoffee Club
• Pune OpenCoffee Club
• Mumbai OpenCoffee Club
• Hyderabad OpenCoffee Club
• Delhi OpenCoffee Club
• Noida OpenCoffee Club
• Kolkata OpenCoffee Club

Book Review: Johnny Bunko

I just finished reading Johnny Bunko by Dan Pink. This book is aimed at being a career guide to students fresh out of school and college or for those new to the workplace. The first thing that you'll notice is that the whole book is in manga format which I really enjoyed. It was pretty innovative to try something different to reach the audience. Although the book is subtitled a career guide, it isn't one at all, more like a general life guide. The whole book is pretty short — it only took me about half an hour to read. Thats both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the one hand, it is a bit light on content, making only six points. On the other hand, it makes it easy to read and finish, unlike other books which go on for far too long. Overall, I think it works.

114 Execs leave Yahoo!

Yahoo's troubles seem to be making all the wrong kind of news. Now TechCrunch has published a list of execs who have left Yahoo. Apparently more than a hundred since the start of last year. Thats a lot!

Screencast: Using Amazon S3 with Django

Many thanks to Balaji and CSS for organising the second Amazon Web Services meet in Chennai and to Jinesh for being able to make it. (Also check out my live blog of the event on twitter, starting here)

As a part of this meet, I had prepared a demo showing how to build a simple gallery application using Django and Amazon's S3 service. I've recorded it as a screencast and uploaded it on ShowMeDo. It's really simple to use S3 with Django, so take a look.

This screencast uses the Boto python library for accessing AWS.

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

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

TechCruch says that twitter is about to abandon ruby on rails, to which Evan says:

FWIW: Twitter currently has no plans to abandon RoR. Lots of our code is not in RoR, already, though. Maybe that's why people are confused.

Lots of the code is not in RoR? I always thought that they had done twitter completely in RoR. Interesting.

Must watch video for startup founders

DHH gives a fantastic talk at the Y-Combinator Startup School. Every startup founder should take half an hour out and check it out.

The Chennai Photowalk: April

I've just uploaded some of the photos from the april chennai photowalk here. The route was along OMR from Madhya Kailash to NIFT.

The Surprising Right Fit for Software Testing

From HBR: The Surprising Fit for Software Testing

Google announces App Engine, takes on Amazon?

So Google is getting into scalable web infrastructure with the announcement of Google App Engine, apparently taking on Amazon's EC2 and S3 services. Having taken a deeper view however, it seems like they are addressing completely different spaces.

EC2 and S3 offer a whole lot of flexibility. They are independent of each other for a start, which means you can use S3 alone, or EC2 alone, or in combination with Amazon's Simple Queue Service. Secondly, with EC2 you get complete control over the image. You can put any programs in it and you can configure them however you want. You can even run anything on the instance from serving pages to performing computations.

Google's offering is completely different. You can only run web apps. It has to be in Python. You have to use their APIs for accessing data or fetching URLs. No sockets, no subprocesses, no threading, no filesystem access. So there are a lot of limitations.

BUT, what you get in exchange is extreme simplicity. App Engine is perfect for web app that needs to store some stuff in a database and interact with the user via a web server - and that's most of the apps out there. You've even got an SDK to develop offline and then sync it online.

Another bonus for Django developers: The APIs seem to be heavily influenced by Django. What this means is that if you are a Django developer, it should be relatively straightforward to deploy your applications onto App Engine. In fact, there is even some official documentation for doing just that.

If you design your application well, it shouldn't be too complex to take a Django app and port it to use the App Engine API, and vice-versa, take an App Engine app and move it to Django on another web host. That way you do not have platform dependence to Google and you can still move to another web host in the future.