BarCamp3 @ Hyderabad

BarCampHyderabad3 is in the third in the series of Barcamps being organized in Hyderabad. This time, it’s about Web 2.0 communities, and organized at the Infosys campus.

Starting with Bharat and DD Ganguly from DimDim, there were many speakers this time compared to the previous one, but mostly are duos from the same company – Jay Pullur and Ramesh from Pramati, Kapil and Vishnu from Slideshare, Brijesh and Jaiganesh from Infosys, and Ashish and Vignesh from my employer, Cordys.

The theme of this bar camp was, in my opinion, debate! Yes, there were debates almost for every presentation right from the beginning. The initial one (kick-off by Ramesh Loganathan) was itself delayed by about 40 minutes with many talks and questions in between. Bharat started his presentation on DimDim but never completed it, and was taken over by DimDim’s CEO DD Ganguly. The most argued one was Jay Pullur’s session on rich web-desktop, which took more than an hour to recede.

The one with least questions might be Janakiraman (on MSN Live Bots - a re-telecast from DEVCON 2006), which is mainly because we were busy laughing on the Bollywood BOT and its cute answers :-)

The most techie stuff was a presentation by Vishnu on Java-Ruby and the most interesting was Ashish’s presentation on Web 2.0 People. His presentation is completely non-technical and mind boggling. I didn’t see the presentation when he prepared it, waiting for a surprise and I got it as I wanted :-)

The grand finale was by Vignesh, whose presentation was one of the very best I’ve seen in recent times. It was so good that the discussion still continued even after the presentation was over! We almost felt its yet another “Cordys Day” :-)

For someone who attended BarCamp2, this must be a disappointing experience, for there are no sponsors, no freebies and no T-shirts.

But leaving the rest, there was at least some good memories of visiting a nice campus (Infosys), a couple of T-Shirts from Slideshare and some good questions to ponder, triggered by Ashish :-)

Why Third Monkey?

So, why did I name it the third-monkey? Because “third monkey” was taken by someone already! :-)

Well, seriously there is no specific reason for that. Instead of the traditional name blogs and blogs with no reasonable names, I thought something different is good for a start!

But, again, why third monkey? There is this famous joke about “monkeys in a tree”. There are many corny versions of it, but the one that was the most popular is this:

Q: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?

A: Because he was dead.

Q: Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree?

A: Because he was stapled to the first monkey!

Q: Why did the third monkey fall out of the tree?

A: Peer pressure!!

It suited well, so I took the name :-)

The many other versions can be googled, but I found this the funniest:

Why did the first monkey fall out of the tree?
It died.

Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree?
It forgot to let go of the first monkey.

Why did the third monkey fall out of the tree?
Monkey see, monkey do.

Why did the fourth monkey fall out of the tree?
Peer pressure.

Why did the tree fall down?
Because it thought it was a monkey.

Why did the boy fall off his bike?
He was hit by four falling monkeys and a tree.

Have fun!

Surprise!

If not for my first blog on DEVCON 2006 (too good story to miss the blog space), this could have been my first webblog!

Yes, it’s truly surprising to see myself start blogging. Originally created on June 30th, 2006 and after being inactive for a long time (6 months???), I decided it would be worth the wait, so let me get started!

I would like to post articles in this blog about anything and everything, which might mean like Work, People, Strategy, Knowledge, Learning, Growth, Innovation, Music, Fun, Experiences...Confused? Then let it be :-)

I've read somewhere about blogging which said:

The fastest way to understand blogging is to try it out the phenomenon that's transforming web and media to a participatory activity.

What will happen if you start participating? Who knows...it might be fun though :-)

A Disclaimer - The content of this blog is heavily dependent on my mood swings!

MUGH - My first experience on a developer conference

This Sunday (19^th November), I had the opportunity of attending DevCon 2006 at the Microsoft Office in Hyderabad (Gachibowli). DevCon is an annual event which facilitates knowledge exchange among developers and architects from various organizations. MUGH conducts conferences on the innovations around .NET, and this year's focus is on the recent developments in .NET framework, and SQL Server 2005.

Personally I am very much excited about attending this event. But, it seemed to me it was the same for many developers here as well! 450+ registrations on the website, and almost equal number of attendants…it’s good I started early to arrive at the right time. By the way, did I tell you this is also my first visit into the Microsoft campus? :-)

The program started with a presentation by the sponsors, MAQ software, on Mobile devices market and .NET Compact framework. We had a nice idea on the latest (selling) cell phone brands in the market.

Followed by which, Cordys (that's my company!) presented on SOA and the Green Field Myth. It’s about the paradigm shift we need to have on getting into SOA architecture, and a nice demo on Cordys platform and how it does abstraction to deliver software as a service. The demo was received really well!

There were a couple of eye-catching presentations from Microsoft Team on Web 2.0, Atlas, and on MSN live by Janakiraman (the TV9 guy). MSN Live demo was about a couple of Live Bots (type a query...get an automated response) and it kept us awake after lunch :-)

We had some more on C# 2.0 features and what to expect in 3.0. Though its interesting to see more classes and support getting added, but additions always come with more complexities :-)

And then the last was on WS-Factory, which was fast-paced and completely technical. I felt it dragging, but that might be because it’s the last for the day?

Its interesting to see the developer community in such an active mood till the end of all the demos. Though every session was not on time, and it got extended by almost an hour, the lot stayed back, and did not agreed for conducting parallel sessions to speed up!

In hindsight, its sad to note that there were some hiccoughs throughout the program in the form of the delays in security checks (no ‘parallel processing’ :-)), double registration (there was an online registration but that’s not considered), non-availability of pen and books (lucky I got a paper and pen to scribe), bad lunch, no directions in campus/canteen…

There was a continuous disturbing tick…tick sound throughout every presentation like a time bomb that’s about to go off any moment…I finally managed to find what it was…it’s the sound of System Clock running on every presenter’s laptop coming through the speaker! :-)