SpringSters - Blogging Bunch

Many of us at MangoSpring have been eagerly waiting for BarCamp Pune 4. Anuj, Vishwa, Shivesh, Basant, Ravinder and myself were all in attendance. It was an exciting day, as this was the first public demo and showcase of PurpleTrail, our first big project at MangoSpring. We have been spending a lot of time and energy getting it ready for public use, and we just recently entered it into beta stage. BarCamp was the right platform to showcase it.

BarCamp is not new to most of us. Anuj had already presented in previous BarCamps in Delhi, etc and I have been an organizer for some previous BarCamps in Pune. BarCamp is always a hit, as 99% of the people attending the event are very interested in the technology, unlike other conferences.

I chose a very interesting topic: “Git Introduction”. I have been using Git for the last two months in my free time. We don’t use it at MangoSpring yet, though I hope that will change soon. Overall, I have found Git to be an excellent distributed source control management tool and I wanted to tell others about it.

On the day of the BarCamp, our talks were scheduled for the first and second talks after lunch. The entire morning at the BarCamp was noisy. People were discussing with each other, and it created a quite geeky, techie and enthusiastic environment.

At 2pm, Anuj started his fast, though relaxing, speech. He has prepared slides and explained in detail and how it works? Initially people were listening as they did not have any idea about product. As Anuj started explaining the features, I was seeing “wow” in their faces. Almost everyone listening got excited about the product. As time went by, initial small whispering in the crowd turned into silence. The only talking was Anuj’s voice, and he had captivated everyone’s attention.

Next Anuj moved onto the demo part of the talk, and this turned out to be a big success. As decided, Anuj demoed the web version and most of the clients running (Symbian, J2ME, desktop, WAP). There are two great moments I remember best. The first was when Vishwa was using WAP and the Symbian client to chat with Anuj, who was using the web version. The second was when Anuj invited two guys sitting in the audience to a demo using their mobile numbers. Within no time they received invite SMSs. Both of these were even a “wow” to me, as it was a real world thing happening in front of me. I think that I was even more happy, as I have been responsible for working on the SMS invites portion of the product. It was very clear that our communication platform the power to change people’s daily life. After seeing everyone’s reaction, I am quite sure that Anuj’s talk was the best talk in this BarCamp. Even afterwards, some people told me that they liked the product very much.

After the it was time for my Git talk. The target of the talk was to inspire people to start using Git for their projects. It turned out to be a good talk, and I think I have inspired enough people to consider Git as their source control management tool.

BarCamp Pune 4 was a great success. Hats off to the BarCamp organizers and the presenters. We all are waiting for the next BarCamp which is scheduled to happen in September.