Barcamp Bangalore

I recently attended Barcamp Bangalore at IIM-B.

Barcamp is a community-driven initiative to share knowledge, experience, and ideas among like-minded (but actually quite diverse) people in an Open Space style conference.

Here's an account of my fun-filled experience:

I had the good fortune of being part of Barcamp Bangalore 2007 (17-18 Nov) at IIM-B (although I attended just Day 1 and had to miss Day 2 because of an afternoon flight back to Pune). It was a great experience, it being my 1st Barcamp. I wish more of ThoughtWorkers from Pune were there, not that there weren't enough TWers at the event already: we had Sidu Ponnappa, Ketan Padegaonkar, Anandha "Jake" Krishnan, Suresh "Loser" Harikrishnan, and Rohith Rajagopal (all from Bangalore office), and yeah, recently-ex TWer Naresh Jain too.

Here's my side of the story:

There were a LOT of people at the Barcamp. Much different from my experience at the PLUG Mash. But registration was handled well: everyone were given name tag stickers, barcamp stickers, notepads, etc. Not to mention Google recruiting material!!! LOL. (But I didn't see any Googlers around... not sure how many came.)

The eXtreme Programming collective, led by Naresh Jain, was among the first to start. Naresh listed out on the whiteboard some hands-on sessions that he wanted to do (TDD, Refactoring, Design), a few discussions (Is Design Dead? Is Enterprise Architecture Dead?), and the talk I had prepared on Agile. The collective, which comprised of people from varied backgrounds and roles, from game designers to bioinformatics researchers, and from PM's to Dev's/QA's, then voted on what they wanted to cover and in what sequence. Luckily my talk got selected as the first thing to do, partly because there were folks who were new to Agile.

I started my talk, estimated at 30 mins; however, that being an "ideal time estimate" it actually went on for about 50 mins or so, if I'm not mistaken. This was because I was stopped almost at every slide with questions which quickly turned into debates. Naresh tried to help by detaining stuff to a "Parking Lot" (a list of topics to discuss after the talk) but it didn't help much. I'm not complaining however: even though I had to rush in the end, I still value the discussions we had during the talk. Thanks again to Naresh for helping out with some doubts raised that I was unsure how to tackle; his experience came to my aid. In the end I asked for feedback and was happy to receive positive comments. One was especially helpful: that I should back each informative (bookish?) slide with some real examples or snippets from personal experience. I'll try to work on that. As for my feedback about the attendees... well, they laughed at my PJ's that I interspersed in my talk, so they weren't too bad. ;-) Seriously though, I was glad to see their level of interest/interaction, and particularly their curiosity about how things are done in TW.

Before lunch began, Naresh covered the Parking Lot topics, during which the following ideas of his impressed me:

- grading system for stories, ie, grade the possible levels of implementation for each story so that it can help adjust the quality/sophistication of a story's implementation

- timeboxing should not be 'cut out features if they cannot be completed' -- try to deliver all features but at various grades, eg- high priority stories could be high grade while lower priority stories could be delivered at lower quality grades

- instead of backlog, ie, a list, have a tree structure for stories

The rest of the Parking Lot topics revolved around ScrumMaster vs Project Manager, Estimating techniques, how to treat Non-Functional Requirements tests, TDD, etc.

After a good lunch, I shifted loyalties and moved over to the Ruby collective. Sadly the person who was to lead the collective had to leave urgently for personal reasons, and it came upon the trusty TWer Musketeers - Sidu, Ketan and me - to salvage the show. We did a pretty decent job, imho, at speaking mostly impromptu, especially Sidu and Ketan. I must say that I was pretty impressed by Sidu - he knows how to engage his audience. Too bad I wasn't that good when it suddenly came upon me, out of nowhere, to give a Rails demo! Heck, I didn't even have Rails installed on my laptop! After a few embarrassing moments of my struggling with Ketan's laptop on Ubuntu (new for me), I started off implementing a website with Rails... but I was too slow and ended up losing half the crowd! They simply left. Ahem... thankfully Sidu came to the rescue and started with a Mingle demo. That interested people. Sidu and Ketan then concluded the collective with "Metaprogramming with Ruby". I had prepared a short talk on JRuby for the collective but there wasn't time for it -- by the end of the Metaprogramming talk, we were already being literally driven out of the room by the IIM-B staff! LOL.

Before leaving, I got a cool Barcamp tshirt. I'm proudly wearing it today...

Looking forward to more such events. :-) (And oh, yeah, traveling Kingfisher!! Never seen so many pretty flight attendants in one plane! LOL.)

For other unbiased accounts about my session, check out the blogs out there: yes, people blogged about me!

Tags: technology:talks, personal Last modified 08:55 Sun, 6 Jan 2008 by AmanKing. Accessed 1,236 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.