Shwetank Dixit

On the 7th and 8th of March, Barcamp Bangalore 8 was organized a Yahoo! India's office. It was a good experience, with some very interesting sessions happening all around.

The good thing that I found in this barcamp, was that the focus was on Technology, which I thought had been missing in the last few barcamps i had seen across india. Not that non-tech topics are not welcome, its just that I thought that tech topics were being slowly being sidelined in some cases. Being a geek, I really enjoyed the tech talks and I'm glad this barcamp had a definite tech focus. I presented on the first day on "The Future of Web Standards" where I talked about and demoed upcoming technologies like Canvas, SVG, CSS3 and HTML5.


Having said that, there were a lot of non-tech topics as well, and I myself presented a talk on the second day on Mobile Web Trends, which was not really a very techy topic as well (though it was a *little* bit techy). I also attended a session on calligraphy, and one on open source licensing models as well. I particularly enjoyed dhempe's talks on power twitter users, and digital filmaking.

The thing that was a concern was that since all the sessions were happening in one giant area, sometimes you had to shout for the audience to listen to you, and the audience sometimes had trouble listening to the speaker as there was outside noise from other sessions happening just a few feet away.

But overall, it was nice and the fact that there were coffee shops (even a barista), and some great food from the Yahoo! India office mess, meant that we had a fun time with great food and drinks. The smileys distributed there were fitting of the mood everyone experienced there.