Lots of Delhi php hackers at barcampdelhi2 were interested in kapil's talk about making the switch to Ruby (from PHP).

After completing the first iteration of slideshare, we estimated that it would have taken twice as long in PHP: and all of the developers on the project were experienced PHP guys who were new to ruby!

Good PHP developers seem to learn ruby and rails extremely quickly, so the payoff from switching is pretty immediate.

So it's official! We have a location for BarCampDelhi2, which is happening next weekend (the 9th) in Noida.

Many thanks to Impetus Infotech for donating space and wifi! The location is

The Impetus Infotech (India) Pvt. Ltd.
D - 27, Sector 59, Noida

Should be fun! If you're a techie in the Delhi metro region, this is an event that you can't afford to miss.

This month will see an embarassment of riches for Indian alpha geeks. Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR barcamps are scheduled. This weekend it's barcampbangalore2. Coming up on december 9th is barcampdelhi2. And finally, barcamppune2 and barcamphydrabad3 is coming up on the 16th and 17th of December.

I'll be at the Delhi (duh) and Pune barcamps. I don't think I can make Bangalore or Hydrabad(I'm checking to see if last-minute air tickets are available though).

Since we helped organize the first barcamp in India earlier this spring, there have been more barcamps in India than in any other country besides the US.

BarCamp Bangalore looks to have been an awesome event. Amit has a nice writeup. Writeups from stateside visitors emphasize the world is flat meme. Kamla had a nice speaker-by-speaker review. But my favorite posting is the mugshots taken of every participant.

When Amit, Gaurav, Manik, and I organized barcampdelhi, we were worried that nobody would show up. But it seems the barcamp meme has found a vibrant home in the indian tech community. Awesome!

Uzanto is still growing our team in Dehli. So why should you come work for us instead of the other guy? I've got a top 10 list.

On the heels of barcampdelhi, a geek dinner is being organized by Rakesh Argawal (CEO of Snapstream) and Gaurav Bhatnagar (from Tekriti) on March 13th. We're meeting at the DLF Mega Mall food court in Gurgaon at 8:30pm. RSVP required (rakesh AT snapstream DOT com), and we're going dutch. This should be a lot of fun!

Saad documented barcampdelhi amazingly well. He not only shot some heautiful photographs, he also shot some video of my presentation on preloading data in AJAX. Here's me talking about metaphors you can use to explain preloading, from an engineering and design perspective.

Adobe India was amazingly generous in hosting BarCamp Delhi. They not only provided food, wifi, and two fully loaded conference rooms (with projectors, lcd screens, wireless mics, etc). They also turned off their security system, letting 100 people roam around their offices unescorted and without identification. This made it possible for us to use all their conference rooms, so that everybody who wanted to present would have an opportunity. Special thanks to Ajay Pande for making it all happen, Neeraj Chawla for setting up the facilities, and Dheeraj Muku for making sure we had the IT infrastructure we needed.

Thanks guys! You rock.

Putting the bar in bar camp delhi.

Manish Jethani stepped up to the stage at barcamp Delhi yesterday, opened up vi, and started hacking in FLEX. Within a period of about 15 minutes, he built a FLEX application that consumed the rss feeds from youtube, displayed the top videos in a data grid, and allowed you to play the videos. Check it out! An impressive testiment to the power of FLEX as a multimedia platform, all done with completely FREE (as in beer) technology. Really cool stuff.

Rakesh Agrawal (CEO of SnapStream Media) is talking now.

His blog is lambipooch.blogspot.com (ambipooch means longtail in Hindi!).

He's demonstrating the firefly mini, a new remote for SnapStream.

He also did a demo of the beyondtv user interface. Very slick stuff, implemented directly in Direct3D.

Here's a snapshot of him trying to get his laptop hooked up for power (the plug kept falling out, but we managed to rig it so that it would stay in place).

Manish Dhingra (from Tekriti) is talking about structured blogging: microcontent publishing / aggregation. In particular, he's talking about the structured blogging plugins that they wrote for MovableType / WordPress.

He gives great examples of how structured blogging could be used in a knowledge work context to capture important pieces of information. Things like bugs, troubleshooting tips, etc. The best example he gave of this is the "I'm stuck" phenomenon. When you're coding, you often are stuck on something simple. Getting unstuck fast has high ROI, and you’re probably stuck at a place where most people get stuck.

The key payoff of structured blogging in an enterprise context is easing "responsibility transition". If your employees put their knowledge into a system, it'll be easy to recover if they are sick / leave.

I asked about how to solve the motivation problem: he said basically that you have to reward employees for contributing knowledge to the system.

These modules seem like they might be really useful for a whole host of situations where you want to build an interface to capture structured data of some kind.

Go here for all the photos. Here's a snap of the afternoon schedule.

WATiR (Web Application Testing in Ruby) is being demoed by Angrez Singh from Persistent Systems now at delhibarcamp. It looks like a compelling way to generate test scripts for web applications. You turn it on, use the web application according to your test, and it automatically generates Ruby script that will replicate the action. You can also write the script yourself. The API looks pretty simple and well-designed. This would work for any application, you don't need to use RUBY in your development.

WATiR is IE-specific, which is a drag. The folks at Persistent Systems (based out of Pune) have built a Firefox extension that lets you use WATiR to test on Firefox! They also have built an extension that supports querying the DOM by XPATH in your text scripts. Everything they've written is open-sourced and available for anyone to use for free.

Lots of Ruby and AJAX stuff is happening in Dehli. But frankly there are at least 10 people at this conference who flew in from Pune. If I was starting up in India I would consider Pune as a base: it seems to have a lot of super-enthusiastic hackers.

Kapil (a software engineer at Uzanto) is presenting now at BarCampDelhi. He's giving a tutorial on using the MCV pattern in the context of AJAX. It's good stuff ... besides MVC, he's covered an explanation of closures, a basic approach to packaging, minimizing the javascript that is included in the initial download, and some other stuff I probably forgot. Good stuff. I can't wait till we can show the stuff he's been working on ;->

I'm sitting at barcamp Delhi. VeerChand Bothra of NetCore is demoing a very slick "microcontent client" called mytoday.com. It seems to be a specialized AJAX homepage. It allows the quick creation of niche publications that aggregate and present rss data. The design is very slick, with geographic filtering. It also has very rich integration with phone (at sister site m.mytoday.com). It makes it very simple to great aggregated feeds. Check out mytoday.com/bcdelhi, which they built in an hour and which is consuming all the blogs, tagged photos, etc from barcamp delhi. Awesome!

The core insight of this approach seems to be that most "real people" won't build up an rss reader from scratch. But they'll be OK with deleting feeds from a pre-existing set.

Presentation available here.

UPDATE: emergic writes about MyToday.