As planned, I attended the second edition of BarCamp Chennai and it was very good. I missed the fun on the first day but made up for it on the second day. We had some very nice sessions and above all I really enjoyed the discussions which we had during the sessions.
Dream Moment
I experienced a dream-come-true moment when I shook hands with Kiruba. I have been following him in the cyber space for nearly 2-3 years, but it was only now, I got a chance to talk to him in the physical world.
Sessions
There were lot of talks which took place on day two. Almost all of them were very interesting and lively. I will try to brief on some of them which I attended and found interesting.
First was the session titled “Indian Education System Sucks” by Viru. The session was very interactive, partly because of the title and partly because of how Viru handled it. There were lot of points which were discussed and towards the end almost everyone agreed that there are some major flaws in the system. Once the problem was identified and accepted the discussion shifted towards finding out the possible solutions to make it better.
Next was the session titled “Global Financial Meltdown and IT Industry” by Sukumar, Ganesh, Raj and Syed. Out of all the other sessions this was very informative and I personally learned a lot out of it. Sukumar gave an insight about the core reasons behind the meltdown and how it might affect India. The following are some of the quotes which I noted during that talk.
The world nearly came to an end in 2008
If you borrow 5 lakhs, you will be afraid of the bank, but if you borrow 500 cores, the bank will be afraid of you.
There is one more time bomb which is waiting. US has around 1.6 trillion dollars in credit card balance.
The western press is misleading. They talk only about ideology and not about common man.
Aswin anand has a nice write-up about the other sessions, so I am not going to repeat them here. Thanks Aswin, you saved a couple of key strokes for me. 🙂
Wifi
If you ask me, one thing which really sucked was wifi. It was very slow and most of the time it timed out. I was planning to do live tweeting during the event, but because of wifi and my laptop battery, I only managed a few.
Photos
I took a couple of photos during the event with my amazing Powershot S5 and you can view them in Flickr. You can also do a search in Flickr with the term bcc2 to get other photos.
Verdict
Overall, it was a very nice event, well planned and executed. Without any doubt I could say that it was a huge success. The credit goes to the organizers for taking extra effort to make the event a success. Thanks guys and eagerly waiting for BarCamp Chennai 3 🙂