BarCamp | BarCampHyderabad5 [ BCH5 ]

Its my first experience at a BarCamp and i was most fascinated to attend this because it was hosted at the Google campus in Hyderabad. I have heard a lot about other BarCamps in bangalore and even about the latest DevCamp in bangalore which was attended by my friends varalu and paramesh.

I finally managed to make it to the Google's campus at 10.30AM accompanied by one of friend Dhuree. I was surprised to see the overwhelming number of people who have gathered over there. I could see many people coming up who have not registered at the wiki.

After all the initial registration and stuff got over we were led to the Google's massive cafeteria where the presentations were going on. From then on there were a series of talks going on by lots of enthusiastic speakers. These are some of the presentations which are worth a mention

• Open Source Development Model by Saifi Khan from http://www.twincling.org/ - This session was too good. I enjoyed this session very much and got a lot of eye openers on the open source development model. It was very much inspiring and the speaker was able to influence the audience very well. He is part of a society called TWINCLING, which basically promotes Open source software in Andra Pradesh and parts of Maharashtra.
  
• How to Build a Successful Blog by Amit Agarwal. - The speaker is a full-time blogger and makes his living by blogging. He gave very good ideas and tips for blogging and do s and donts. This session was very good and he gave many of his personal experiences with blogging.
• Lighting up the Web with Silverlight 2 by Janakiram from Microsoft. Like a typical Microsoft campaign, this person was able to capture the attention of the audience very well. The session was very good with many demos like a mini media player on the web which can run multiple movies simultaneously with HD quality. A small demo about Moonlight, a mono based implementation of Silverlight and a mash-up application built over this.
  
• Building Low Cost Scalable Web Applications by Ramesh Rajamani. Even though this session was little bit slow and very much prolonged , i was able to grab some ideas about building a good web application.
• Ruby on Rails relevance to Startup's, Sumanth Krishna. This session must have been named as Ruby on Rails tutorial and the speaker was not sticking onto the topic properly.
• Behavior Driven Development using RSpec, Sanjeev Kumar.

And i missed some of the presentations because of the parallel track which was going on for sometime.

• Women in IT and Entrepreneurship by Kavita Vemuri
• The BrainWave Application Development Platform
  
• http://atuitu.com/ a social networking website for telugu people
• http://www.corners.in/ Web2.0 Content centered networking for Indians worldwide

And generally, we had a very good support from Google and the place was too good which had lot of ambiance, multi-point projectors, relay telecast on TVs. We had lot of support from Google employees. A special mention to the food at Google( It was excellent).
Some of the bad things which i was able to observe was there was very less participation from audience and many were roaming and disturbing the speaker sometimes. I was able to see the worst of things when the T-shirts were distributed. It was a complete mess around that place and the google folks were struggling to control the crowd. And many managed to get away with 2 or even 3 T-shirts.

I atleast expect some better way of organizing these things in the next BarCamp and also speakers should try to stick on to the topic and not to deviate from it.

PS: More Photos to be added soon. Guys if you get some photos please send me.