I write <code/> and occasionally prose
We would be blogging live from CodeCampMumbai. You can follow us Live@ CodeCampMumbai. Looking forward for the event tomorrow.
Which reminds me I need to have a good night's sleep before the event. It will be an all nighter at IIT Bombay. Join the fun or do pay us a visit 😉
[FlashBack-Cut-1] Little less than a month back Ankur and me had a couple of mail exchanges over how we should try and bring the hacker/developer community together.
[FlashBack-Cut-2] During the closing session of BarCampMumbai2 there were some participants who were not satisfied with the technical depth of the sessions at the BarCamp. I took this opportunity and quickly created a simple CodeCampMumbai page on the barcamp wiki and announced the event on the stage.
[Present-Cut-3] Thus, emerged CodeCampMumbai and a format which is heavily influenced by some popular philosophies.
Here is what we have taken from other popular manifestos/cultures:
CodeCamps:
Read more: CodeCamp Manifesto
Hackathons:
Read more here, here and here.
BarCamps:
Read more here.
In short:
CodeCampMumbai caters to the community of CodeCampers, bound by the culture of Hackathons and is based upon open participative and collaborative nature of BarCamps.
Date:: 17th - 18th Nov 2007
Register here:: http://barcamp.org/CodeCampMumbai
Venue:: IIT-B Mumbai
Mailing list:: http://groups.google.com/group/codecampmumbai
If you love to code and code for the love of it you ought to be present. See you there 😉
I will be attending the BarCampPune3 today.
The lineup of sessions seems to be exciting. Personally I am interested in meeting new people, people whose blogs i follow, people who i have read about, people who i have spoken to on phone, people with whom i have had email exchanges with and finally few people who i have known. So, all in all its going to be an interesting bunch of people who I am going to meet 🙂
Hey if you qualify to be among the people who I plan to meet then do use the code 'aiwa' when you greet me :p (LoL)
Now I have interesting people to meet at the BarCamp, a Nikon 4600 and I also have a Sansa 2.0gb c250 player/recorder. Lets see if I can put them to some good use :>?
Before signing off allow me to link back to BarCampMumbai posts (2005).
BarCampPune3… here i come 😉
To start with I said to myself, “I have tried the Half Marathon! Why not try the Hackathon too !! - 22nd July”
I was not sure of taking part in the hackathon as i had never treid RoR, there was still a week to go and not many participants had signed up on their wiki. Even then I just happend to put my name there in the list of participants. There was a faint chance of me going for the hackathon if Shweta (intern at my office) would join in as she has been trying out Ruby on Rails (RoR) for over a month now. I asked her and she was going to leave for Hyderabad a day before the hackathon. I had almost left the idea of joining the hackathon as i had to work a lil harder the same week to meet project deadlines. To cut things short I was surely going to miss the hackathon. Later in the day (I guess Tuesday) something happened (I am not sure wat) but I decided I would give it a try. So, here I was having no clue of RoR but wanting to attend the hackathon a core no-frills geek meet. I took a 15 minute tutorial (LoL) from Shweta on RoR and also got the Agile Web Programming with Rails book (thnks to my office). I would read the book while travelling in the bus and late at night. I could only read it for 3 days.
It was around 11am on 29th July and I typed the first command to start a project in RoR… $ rails mars
If I do not discuss the positives from the event then I won’t do justice to the thought behind organising such an event.
To keep things short
People !
- I met quite a few interesting, friendly and like minded people around.
- Vaibhav Domkundwar from Better Labs who was one of the organisers, was really interested in the proceedings and made everyone feel comfortable. One of the things he stressed on was taking this initiative forward. He also discussed the future potential of the applications with each one personally. He even discussed about his latest initiatives like dealplumber.com and how he wanted the Tech community in India to develop and grow.
- Satish Mishra again from Better Labs made sure that everything was in place. Later after the hackathon he also shared his views on what Better Labs was all about and their india2.0 initiative.
- Pratik who also happened to come down for BarCampMumbai was participating. I had read his blog and even commented on the BarCamp posts. Never happened to to know/speak him (didnt happen to start a conversation with him at the BarCamp). He has been actively involed wtih RoR for around 3 months now. BTW he won the hackathon !
Learning !
- Yup, being there was a learning experience. Though I was not sure of how I would fair at the hackathon but I was sure that I would try to experiment with RoR for 24 hours. Everyone present was helpful and alway ready to share what they knew.
IDeas !
- Everyone was working on their own ideas. The positive vibes around were contagious. Being there was really encouraing.
Future !
- I am sure something like this will catch up soon in other cities too like the BarCamp. Looking forward for more of such geeky encounters.
Deliverables !
- I would surely be realeasing Mars soon to the open source community. This is going to be my second initiative after Qikblogger and I am excited.
Thnks !
Yup, thnks to the organisers and congratulations for a super-successful event.
The MaRaThoN has just begun 😉
Have been following Ruby and Ruby on Rails(RoR) for some time now. Today (in the last 24 hours) I finally treid it out live at the hackathon. Ruby is coOL and Ruby on Rails is even coOLer! Like there is no smoke without fire… RoR really stands up to the hype (wateva) around it.
I also liked the whole concept of a hackathon. Cheers to Better Labs for initiating it and hearty congratulations for its success.
More about it later…
Hey I was selected as the SiLver Hacker at the hackathon after the evaluations ! Cheers !!! I built a planet application using Ruby on Rails in 36 hours and named it Mars (any guesses y ?). You can know more about it here.
I guess I was waiting for a excuse (?) to start using RoR. Now I am sure its going to be a MaRaThoN run with ruby for company.
Yup I am at the punehackathon !
Hackathon.in
A no-frills geek meet, an effort from Better Labs, a tiny geeky company in Pune.
Check some live pics and action at http://punehackathon.pbwiki.com/FrontPage
This is a test post for my application Mars which I plan to build as a part of the hackathon
To start with I must say BarCampMumbai was as coOL as its theme 'Bindaas Geeks | Hackin over Vada Pav'
Some highlights :
What I presented @ BarCamp ?
Topic:
TagSurfer - Extending the TagCloud
Motivation:
Unlike categories which are strict in nature tags are flexible. Flexibility of tags also comes from the fact that we use multiple words (keywords) to define a single item.
eg: barcamp barcampmumbai tagsurfer hacksNow I would love to have a mechanism by which I could actually find some related content or may be just digg through the right content.
TagClouds is a good way of doing it. Its intuitive and looks good. But seriously its just 1D... I click on one tag and I am jst shown entries tagged with that particular tag.
As the number of tags entries (or no. of entries in your blogs or photoblogs ) increase one would surely need more intuitive UIs than TagClouds
I did give examples of del.icio.us and flickr in my talk. I also commented that deli.icio.us doesnt allow me to search for entries tagged with 'ajax and css'. Here is what I meant. If I search for 'ajax css' in the search box on del.icio.us I am given with links that are tagged with 'ajax or css' and not necessarily with 'ajax and css'. Try 'ajax on my bookmarks'... you wud be shown links and on the right presented with 'related tags' links . Now this is interesting. If I click on the small '+' sign beside scriptalous I get all the links tagged with 'ajax and scriptalous' only. (... correct me if i m wrong 🙂
Newways.... more importantly TagClouds are jst 1D! and there is a lot we can do to improve them...!
Proposed 'TagSurfer':
TagSurfer is a TagCloud with added functionality of surfing through the tags. Its more like getting deeper and deeper within the tagcloud.
Here is a small limited demo:
http://akshay.zeeblo.com/soc/ *Check the right panel with heading tagsurfer.
- Just hover your mouse over any of the tags... * DO Not Click :d
- Number in brackets show the no. of entries you would find after surfing that tag
- Superscripts show the order in which you surfed
- Top panel with images resembling '<' - Back and 'o' reload
- Lots of functionality could be added like if you surfed through a few tags and then clicked on one then you would be shown entries within that path only.
eg: 'barcamp -> barcampmumbai' is what you surfed through and finally click on 'hacks' you would be shown entries tagged with barcamp and barcampmumbai and hacks
What it used:
PHP + Prototype ( 😉 Ajax )
Yup this was my first attempt to incorporate Ajax. TagSurfer needed Ajax and thats why I used it. It wasnt redundant at all.
Acknowledgements:
Pradeep for allowing me to make a presentation for TagSurfer on his laptop. And Mohit, Abhishek, Atul, Ajay, Hitesh, Ajay, Narain, Kiruba, Murli and everyone who attended for making BarCampMumbai a reality and offcourse RocKiNg!!!
Download:
http://akshay.zeeblo.com/tagsurfer.zi(http://www.akshaysurve.com/projects/tagsurfer/)
- Edit the tagsurfer.php file to customize font sizes and color
- Add <div id="tagsurfer">&ly;/div> to you template to get TagSurfer.
- Copy the whole folder to you Wordpres directory and then enable the plugin in admin section.
Comments:
There was a lots of discussion during the talk and even later. Things like 'folksonomy' to ... collaborative filtering all came up and were spoken about. Now I know what 'No spectators , Only participants' means ;-). People were not just listening but were also thinking and improvising.
Hey ...still open to discussion... would surely like to hear from you.
Requests:
Do wish me luck(I desperately need it )... my Final exams starting on 18th of May.
[Update] Some picks from flickr:
Would be leaving for BarCampMumbai in a few minutes. Would be showcasing TagSurfer at the un-conference. For those who hav no clue of BarCamp try >
Well, not many would know of it, me neither. Its the first time that a BarCamp would be held in town and so it would be a coOL experience for me to. Have worked hard ( 2 nights and 1 day :p.. bt i gues its lots during the time of examz).
Wish me luck.
I am sure I would find familiar faces ( ppl whom i knw (been following their blogs) bt they themselves having no clue of me... wud be strange :d)
BTW : still gotta setup everything .... guess wat still I hav to mak my presentations ... LoL
Hope things fall into place.
Cheers.