Thought - Works!

(This blog is moved from my informal Word press blog , and it re-lives my experience of Barcamp Feb' 08 @ Thoughtworks Pune )

This was my first BarCamp ever. Around a week before BarCamp Prasad sent me an IP regarding the Barcamp to be held @ Pune. I was not clear on what the hell is BarCamp.We just had a mild clue of what it is going to be , like we can share our thoughts , attend seminars on different upcoming technologies(yawwwn!) . I asked myself why would i waste my precious saturday just traveling to Pune for a damn Tech Seminar. There were primarily 2 reasons for this.

1. During my college days i was bugged with the standards of the tech seminars and robotics competitions. The same old robots (tweaked with different colors and arms)would win every year. Tech seminars would be more of a hangout and chillout time for friends from different colleges.

2. For an IT Professional Saturday and Sunday is bliss. Work (Because i like what i do ) , and slog for many in the IT sector for 5 days of the week would leave us with hardly 1% energy to dare lift up our hands. This reminds me of the “Finally it is Friday” mails flooding my mailbox when the weekend comes closer :).

Then too there was something i.e Love for Technology which motivated me for getting out of bed @ 5 AM and catch the 1st train to Pune @ 6 30 AM.

Reaching Thoughtworks office in Yerwada made me nostalgic about my own stay in Pune Mastek which is a stone’s throw away from there. With some initial jitters i entered the Thoughtworks office.

I was in for a surprise.What i thought would be dry classroom type sessions , turned out to be an interactive , eye popping and fantabulous session.I had got my newly acquired possession Dell XPS 1530 with me , which turned out to be a boon of sorts with high speed Wi-Fi.

We started with the session on blender , which was great on how to create 3D Animation and conceptualizing the story board.Due to time constraint of half an hour we couldnt get through the nitty gritties , but we managed to understand how Animation companies like Pixar uses such softwares to create real life animation.

The next session was on Zimbra taken by Amit , it was by far themost impressive presentation of the lot. Zimbra is a open source mail recently acquired by Yahoo!.Though Amit started off with the overall features of Zimbra Vs other Mail sites , we geeks finally convinced him to get into the architectural details of Zimbra. Most of the concepts used in Mail servers like Journaling were quite impressive and messaging and security being my forte , i enjoyed it a lot. Being a security guy i asked Amit if Zimbra were planning to use OpenID (because Yahoo! had started using the openID concept in Yahoo! Mail just few days back), though he didn’t comment on it , but a few seconds later and a bit of research on Yahoo! initiatives helped me understand that Zimbra was indeed going to use openID!

The next session was on Web Services and its effect on Future Technologies. Finally something on which i can blabber for ever :). The presentation was taken up by a smart genteleman in his late thirties , the vision of this person regarding the future of Web Services and distributed computing was horizon less. No Buzzwords but pure vision. We helped in this discussion by sharing our ideas regarding SOA and distributed processing.Phew! Amazing , wait there was more in store.

We attended a session on Ruby by siddhu , but some minutes down the line we were hungry and down to hog in the Thoughtworks canteen , followed by an introspective chat in the beautifully crafted Panchsheel IT Park.

Post lunch was a bit sleepy , but followed by some overview on AJAX Frameworks and Web Security . One of the most impressive ones was left for the last , ZachExely, a correspondent for the Huffington Post, an adviser to the Off the Bus project and a founder and president of the New Organizing Institute. He is the guy who revolutionalized the whole political campaigning and funding for Barack Obama. He gave a statistical picture of the rise in popularity and funding after the introduction of campaigning through internet. His talk basically revolved around the advantages that Internet and Web 2.0 can provide in diverse fields , and some unimaginable fields like politics.

Then we had an informal meet with Ketan Padegaonkar and his work on Eclipse SWTBot. and we also got a chance to meet innumerable talented people having varied interests.

What was the most inspiring thing that i could got @ the Barcamp , was the Vision shared by all the Barcampers and the ability to forsee the future and the advantages we can reap out of them.Not one of them was prophesying any particular technology.

We need to rise up and mature above any Technology or platform. Technology just provides a helping hand for implementing any solution. Technology should not dictate any solution but it should be requirement centric.

Vision is the buzzword that would drive the world!