Experience from my first BarCamp session

Apr 19th - BCB6 was my first BarCamp Session - I did not go with lot of expectations, but with inquisitiveness of how the event is organized by the community - overall I think it was a great organization by the community / leads of BCB chapter folks... kudos to the team!

From CoreObjects we visited BCB6 with an intention to do 1 presentation, but we did 2 sessions (second being impromptu), I will share my experience on how these 2 sessions went -

Session #1 : Challenges in building technology products
This session was presented by my colleague Rajesh Sheshadri, his was the first session for the day in "Startups & Demo" category - the main idea for this presentation was to stress on how a vision to build a product can get very obsessive from a technology perspective & lead to delays or wastage of efforts... Rajesh started off well with an intro about the session explaining the evolution of the product over the past 2yrs. He faced some challenges while presenting this session, few folks in audience started questioning the core need for such a product & why or how it would be successful - which was not really the point Rajesh was trying to drive... I think if the audience were little mature to allow speaker to stick to his topic & speak about it, would have been great!

Session #2 : RIA Story - Building RIA using OpenLaszlo
I should thank Mrinal & Panduranga for squeezing this session on OpenLaszlo in between their series of sessions on RIA. I met Mrinal during lunch time, introduced myself as a person with OpenLaszlo experience - he requested me to share my experience of working with OpenLaszlo. My session was a quick 20mins one, below are the highlights of how RIA sessions went -

• Parts of discussion started looking a marketing pitch for the technology, which could have been avoided
• Constant comparison of RIA with HTML was not required - which was also rightly raised by a gentlemen in the group
• Flex, Silverlight - lacked demonstration of real time application, if they could have demonstrated live full fledged RIA products - it would have been great
• Some of the members in the audience were in a pre-conceived notion about Flash - like existence of Flash player is taken for granted - we should have spent some time talking about can every & any kind of product need RIA?
  

Overall... I enjoyed my 1 day visit to BCB6 - I do intend to visit again on their next edition!

Thanks
Bhaskara