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'DevCamp 2008' - A confluence of alpha geeks
By Vimali Swamy
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Monday, 11 February 2008, 20:30 IST
Bangalore: 'DevCamp 2008', an unconference for techies, Saturday saw more than 200 participants swarm the ThoughtWorks office sporting the event logos, T-shirts and wide smiles. The organizers of the BarCamp conducted the one-day camp to bring together alpha geeks to share hard-core technology talk.
The presence of Martin Fowler, renowned author, software consultant, speaker and Chief Scientist of ThoughtWorks, was a bonus to every techie present at the camp. Fowler spoke about the spirit of unconferences and how these discussions oriented sessions help in adding maximum value. "One of the best unconferences which I have attended was the Foo-camp in America which had a few of techies discuss Open Source initiatives. The law of two feet is the best aspect of these events as it allows participants to walk in and out of sessions at any given point of-time," said Fowler.
The event saw more than 600 people register but due to lack of space, the doors were closed once the number of entrants crossed 250. Unlike BarCamps, DevCamp aims to provide a forum for geeks to talk nothing but technology. Free for everyone, one can attend sessions or else volunteer to take sessions in one's area of expertise.
With more than 40 sessions and 4 parallel tracks the camp was a developer's haven. Some of the topics discussed were Nintendo DS Homebrew Hackery, Aakraman A Ruby based war game, Android Plugin Internals and many more.
Events like DevCamp and BarCamp may not sound like the usual company led technology meets but they are been known as a platform where ideas and discussions have taken shape and hit off to form entrepreneurial ventures such as the startup company Picsquare which evolved during one of the BarCamps in late 2006.
