love i$ in the air ....

"Love For Techonology" was the tagline for BarcampPune4 which was held at ThoughtWorks pune on 16th Febuary 2008. it was conducted in high spirits. it was one of the well organized barcamps i have attended. found it better than the last BarCampMumbai .... not that it wasn't good but just that this was better. i have always appreciated all the volunteers putting their time efforts into this. kudos to these organizers (of all barcamps ever held :) )

well the day started with some jRuby stuff which was not all that great ... as the guy was going too much into details. could have been better if ppl start with generalized concepts first and then dive into the details. easy said than done ... maybe... i never gave any session @ barcamps so not sure what could be the reason why ppl touch upon details directly (considering that the audience would be from mixed backgrounds) .... maybe time constraint ... not sure .... anyways.
the next session was on how to be safe ... cyber safety topic by Rohit Srivastwa the same guy who is one of the core members at clubhack. he spoke about various attacks including MITM and ARP poisoning including some demos to crack some of the volunteer's passwords ;) it was good to play around with.
the next interesting session was a guy (nick) named "Sidu" from ThoughtWorks. he gave us an interesting talk on "Why Ruby" he started with general stuff @ Ruby ... very basic stuff ... easy to digest ... simple language ... and then some compare n constrasts with the existing platforms such as java, .Net etc. it was good enough. after that the most intneresting part (the lunch). it was good as well. not better than BarcampMumbai ... IIT though ;)

post lunch, i attended the "e-discovery" by Chetan Gupta he works at Symantec. he had given a talk in clubhack as well. after that i headed to "The danger of search engines & how to protect" by Diwakar Goel (he has co-authored the book titled "Google Hacking"). it was really kool stuff. some of it was from his book but some tricks were new for me as i have not read the book completely. after that it was more of hanging around with fella-campers, getting to know other ppl etc .... this is the best part about barcamps.

so the day ended on a good note. and then i was also fairly impressed with ThoughtWorks in general :) the infrastructure, culture, agile thingy bla bla bla.
photos can be found on flickr here and my bits of memories here. despite all these, im sure i ve missed lot of action @ other sessions. but i was full already ;)
keep up the good work guys.

theres another barcampmumbai coming up in march and so is OWASP on 1st of March. lets see i'd be attending OWASP for the first time so pretty excited. the only sad part is i have to skip my trip to mumbai whenever i attend conf @ pune. but then this was certainly worth it.


- signing off
ameyas7