DevCamp: Acknowledgements and thanks

First, thanks to all the participants for being so involved. I hope all of you felt you participated in at least one good session or discussion and generally felt that your Saturday was well spent.

A very big thank you to all the volunteers who worked hard behind the scenes to make DevCamp happen.

A special thank-you to Kesava Reddy whose idea this was, and who has spent a fair amount of time on DevCamp over the last couple of months.

Some of the takeaways:

• Time slots should be larger than the current 30 mins. I heard a lot of people suggest 1 hour slots, so that's what it'll be next time.


• There was a general feeling that there wasn't enough core technology discussed. Any suggestions on how to fix this?


• People liked the layout of the venue and think it works well fo un-conferences.

Please do chime in with any comments or suggestions you may have toward improving DevCamp.

DevCamp photos can be found on Flickr here. You can also see them as a slide-show.

DevCamp picks up steam

So it's official - Martin Fowler has confirmed that he'll be participating in DevCamp Bangalore. DevCamp seems to be picking up steam with over twenty sessions proposed so far and a week and half to go (oh, in case you're wondering, DevCamp is a one day un-conference focussed on the art of software development).

There are a whole bunch of interesting people showing up - I've already mentioned that Martin will be there, but so will Ravi Mohan, who writes 'One Man hacking', Pradeep BV, co-founder of Mapunity, Rajiv Poddar, founder, CEO and developer at Sedna Wireless, Siddharta Govindaraj, founder and developer at SilverStripe Software, Elizabeth Keogh, core comitter on the JBehave project... and that's just about half of the people whom I know - there are a couple of dozen other hackers whom I don't and I'm pretty sure they'd be just as interesting to meet and hang out with.

The topics proposed are just as interesting - here's a quick snapshot:

1. "Monads in Depth - what they are, what they are good for and how to use them in your favorite language" exclusive OR "Reinforcement Learning - Algorithms and Applications in Robotics" exclusive OR "Vajra - a high performance scheme implementation for Robotics Programming" Ravi Mohan
2. Writing a Java Script Editor From Scratch In Eclipse Jude
3. Writing a reddit clone as an orkut application Jude
4. Programming with Android - Selvan
   1. Touchscreen, SMS handling, Handling web-pages
   2. Phone state handling
   3. Programmatically accessing mobile hardware (Vibarator et al)
   4. FixedPoint Math, 2D Graphics, 3D Graphics with OpenGL-ES
5. "Let's Develop an Open J2ME Mobile Game" - Zarina
6. An introduction to Ruby On Rails, Some good plugins for Rails, server configuration for rails application, Bhushan Ahire
7. Getting Started with Mercurial - Biju Chacko
8. Open ended discussion on 'What really is an enterprise level app?' - moderated by Pradeep B V
9. Call Graph - A free call recording and indexing application for Skype - Rajiv Poddar
10. Deploying python web apps on the desktop - Siddhi
11. Intruder Alert - Snort signature Development - PoC to Signature - Akash Mahajan
12. Microformats and Semantic Web - Jeswin P
13. MOOSE - Multi-scale Object Oriented Simulation Engine for Systems Biology and Neuroscience - Raamesh Deshpande and Subhasis Ray
14. Search Mashups - Some ideas for making search more customizable - Dorai Thodla
15. Semantic Web Indexing - Kallol Borah
16. Poshzones - a bazaar approach to the Semantic web - Sriram Narayan
17. Start developing with GWT - Thejesh GN
18. Writing wargaming aids using Django - Manoj Govindan
19. Aakraman - A game where your Ruby code competes with that of others - Chirag/Akshay
20. Mobitop - Writing cool mobile web applications over Mobisy's Mobile Web Platform 'Mobitop'
21. Behaviour Driven Development - learn from JBehave but do it in JUnit - Elizabeth Keogh
22. Bringing web applications to the desktop using Mozilla Prism - Ram/Suresh

Biju Chacko has proposed and will be moderating a bunch of lightning talks. That's going be happening sometime during the gig; we'll figure out timings and stuff on the fly.

If you're in Bangalore, or will be on the 9th (it's a Saturday) please don't hesitate to sign-up and propose a session (it's a community gig and is completely free). I'll quote the rule-of-thumb for DevCamp sessions here:

Please assume a high level of exposure and knowledge on the part of your audience and tailor your sessions to suit. Avoid 'Hello World' and how-to sessions which can be trivially found on the net. First hand war stories, in-depth analysis of topics and hands on demos are best.

DevCamp Bangalore is happening in February

It's official now - DevCamp Bangalore is happening on February 9^th 2008. The wiki is now up and registrations are open.

DevCamp is an un-conference whose format is very similar to that of BarCamp. The only difference is that DevCamp caters specifically to the software development community, whereas BarCamp address a much broader area of interests.

Please do start blogging about it and remember to tag all your posts with DCB1. There is much that remains to be finalised, so stay tuned for updates because we're trying to ensure that this DevCamp will be worth remembering. Watch this space.