Monday, June 18, 2007

Life Is - A Bar Camp

Had my experience of the first blog/bar camp on saturday. It was really an unconference. However it would have been real cool without those product promos. Rest all was lovely, unique and fun.

My day started there at around 8:45 (one of the few early birds) when the things where just about to start at the venue.....I met sanket, a self-boss. Mechaninal engineer by profession and loved IT guys.. cool...good to know ppl still love them :-).

Met tarun and then headed towards the audi, where rajesh was present to greet us..the zimbra guy,was good to talk to. I offered by helping hand and he asked me to serve the gates :-)... which was fun too... rajesh,sanket,ranjan and myself were standing at the gate and ritika joined us.. She had volunteered for the event. we started with the registration process and distributing the cool blogcamp t-shirts and notepads to the participants.. ranjan was enthu at the beginning to click each one of the them but looking at the crowd later, gave up :-)

The event was getting delayed but I had fun meeting and talking to ppl... there were these gupshup guys who were in true sense the gupshup dudes :-)... Thakkar and the gang were interesting to talk to and we had some nice talks. crowd started pouring in and it was fun to watch different sizes (since we were also distributing t-shirts :-))... Among the unique ones where melody, sakshi and divya uttam who made that presence felt instantly....after about an hour, I started talking with ppl in the audi and met eklavya the watconsult guy... he was also interesting and I had already made up my mind to talk to one/all of these guys. He gave me some interesting information and details.

The fun continued with a round of introductions. Everyone was unique and interesting is what I could observe. Some of them blogged for criket, some for their spouses and some for rakhi sawant and salman khan :-)... some were veteran bloggers with 4-5 yrs of blogging and some of them decided to get birth on that day :-)

Some of them very in their mid-40es while there were a few who were in their teens (15 years to be precise)....All in all you could find almost everyone there :-)

The sessions started with sulekha.com and purplenova presentation. The teams started talking abt their stuff. Although it was good, I would have prefered more experiences and intersting things in all arenas of blogging. I also learnt about OpenId, trackbacks and other stuff talking to people which was an added advantage. Met a big gang from persistent (in fact we realized we were in a majority there). I was also not aware of the fact that persistent is planning to have a bar camp on 7th July in the campus ... :-(....

Kiran, jatinder and all informed me about the same. We had some exciting discussions about ruby on rails, and previous bar camps over lunch. The pool side lunch was also wonderful. Session after that was smsgupshup's thakkar talking abt the product. even though this was again marketing it was done in an interesting manner and hence fun. I had work following me after that and had to run out of the fun...... so that's Harshal reporting (apart from all those CNN-IBN and DNA reporters....) for his own channel :-)

... Njoi