Barcamp Mumbai 2

I attended my first barcamp today at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay,Shailesh J. Mehta School Of Management.Met some interesting guys like the “Pluggie” Shirish who wouldn’t use a mobile phone till OpenMoko came out!Was really impressed by the www.gnome.in
idea of getting the community to express their creativity and get some pocket money as a byproduct.The barcamp was neatly divided into 2 themes,the “techie” part and the “management and startups part”.

Techie Part:

I attended the Indian Language Spellcheck session and the gnome.in session as outlined above.Also,a PHP testing session was attended in “free” time,mainly time which I had not dedicated to some other session.;)

All the interesting sessions were jammed together resulting in clashing of timings but Mehul(from the ILUG-Bom) was there and we divided forces and conquered most,if not all of our common interest topics. Mehul attended the Creative Commons License session while I was attending the JFX, JRuby session which was mainly about how SUN’s new scripting capability (via JFX) would enable less number of lines of code to do more stuff.But the presenter was more of a marketing guy(Amol Desai IIRC) and could not answer questions to the poser’s satisfaction and presumed knowledge of Java and it’s allied products.Aggregatorz.com session was fruitful with me getting to know how startups work.Their idea of aggregating various feeds was fantastic.Check it out at aggregatorz.The Spellcheck in Indian languages session was more of a URL gathering session and an intro to the plans of the presenter to enlarge the database of Indian words(right now limited to Marathi,located at Shabdasampada ) and integrate it with HunSpell which is the dictionary and spell checker for Firefox.

The “Gabbar chupo,Thakur ne “Hacker” bulaya hai” session;) ,later renamed as “Safe Netizens…How to protect yourselves from being hacked” was cool specially with the various ways the presenter showed us how the simple click on Ok when the browser shouts a warning about invalid trust certificates can result in grave consequences for our box and our security.

Management and startups part:

I attended none,though I had a plan to attend Bootstrapping Startups but it clashed with another session.In hindsight,the Bootstrapping startups session would have been better.:P

Good experience overall,and I’m definitely raring to go for the next Barcamp!