day 2 went really well

well the bcb5 is over now, day 2 went quite well, personally i had more to learn than yday, the crowd had thinned a little, groups had fewer people but the discussions were intense. people started coming in around 9:30, first I met prashant who was presenting on social shopping, he runs storrz.com (an online shopping mall mixed with social networking features), its quite an interesting concept, they are planning to launch a closed beta version soon, the store is already functional, there are bunch of merchants like namdhari's and cookie man hooked up and the best part is you can even pay by sodexho meal passes, i am going to try their service this week, will post more on that

slowly the rooms were getting booked, people were skeptical about post-lunch sessions on a sunday and the impending india pakistan cricket match, so the morning sessions were hot, while they were battling it out for time I caught up with abhishek from webaroo. he does designing work and was presenting on usability and sms gupshup, he pointed couple of cool stuff they are working on, there is a search service called search radar, which creates a cloud tag as well as list view of associated terms for any search string, it is still in beta and they a firefox extension, the next one was wikislice, a new way to browse and capture information from wikipedia, user can search for a string and wikislice displays that particular article as well as all the outgoing links from that page and user can download all of it in a compressed package, abhishek is a real funny guy, you should have heard his experience of watching a telugu version of sivaji, the boss without any subtitles- he is newly turned rajinikanth fan

one of the good sessions i attended on day1 was extreme programming and introduction to agile methodology, naresh jain was presenting the second part to it on test driven development, refactoring and pair programming, i ended up missing those yday, he was kind enough to go through the topic just for me and one more guy ajay. naresh used to work for thoughworks and is an independent consultant now working with companies on agile implementations and design workshops, he is a real smart chap, he also moderates the india agile forum. in this session he walked us through some slides introducing the concept of tdd, refactoring and acceptance testing. we worked on a simple stack implementation to understand how do you go about writing tests before developing anything, eye opening to say the least. naresh contributes to an open source acceptance testing framework fitnesse, he showed us a quick demo of it, there is a little nifty feature which lets the users insert rows and columns directly from browser, its a very impressive tool. right after this there was just some open discussions which extended well over lunch and beyond. it was fun watching naresh and mrinal debating about the level of importance that's given for interface and all that jazz that's done in flex/flash.

the challenge of choosing the collective for afternoon was even more difficult, everyone knows that its the last day and would want to extract the best use of time, i planned to attend a critical feedback session of taazza.com by arunram, he was seeking feedback and how people perceived news websites, this was a really interactive session, looks like they have used ruby on rails for development, its a new way of consuming news and i think they are doing a great job, hoping to see some of the feedback implemented soon

while i was at this session, i ended up missing designfest, mobile applications development, information technolgy in schools, how to organize the next barcamp and many more, one of the biggest learnings from my first bar camp experience is to talk to as many people as possible, understand what they are doing and why they are doing it in a specific way, overall i couldn't have asked for more, will be eagerly looking forward to the next meet

~ great job organizers of bcb5 ~

Labels: barcampbangalore, barcampbangalore5