DCamp Bangalore.....Yes I was there

With so many things happening for the engineers Bar Camp, OCC and now D Camp. Sure we are going to see the next MS or Google from India very soon. D Camp or design camp was held a Yahoo office in EGL.

First presentation was by Muthu from Sun Microsystems. He started with demo on how to use CSS and Javascript. Next how to use it to get 'Your Kind' of a look for your webpage. Then we had the demo for YUI Javascript Library. And the usual corporate bashing was kicked off but Muthu cleverly moved the controversy out by saying that YUI is his favourite thats all and the ultimate call to use is on the developer themselves.

Joe Arnold from Yahoo! was next to make a presentation with an unusual title "Learning to Fly". Rather actually it was a great one. Interesting way to explain how to design, using the Wright brothers experience on how to build invent a plane. Some interesting thought on what it takes to build or rather invent a good product.

• You need an itch to invent
• No PhDs actually required
• Test first and test again
• Dont rely on others data
• Gather your own data
• Dont go all at once launches
• Look for inspiration at unlikely places
• Do not over design or over engineer
• Solution often do not exist, invent them
• Look for patterns
• Spend time with engineers

Does that seem like Agile to you. Yes it is but the way he presented the whole idea, it was just excellent.

Third Session was by Ruta from Yahoo! No points for guessing what did he talk about. Yahoo Innovations. Some interesting ones are here

• Yahoo IM karaoke
• Flickerator: Your Yahoo avatar put in your favorite snap at flickr
• Random Avatar generation.(Avatar Transmogrifier)
• Yahoo Avatar Makeover Plugin.Make your own avatar and for your friends too.

Sidenote: Yahoo Avatar was done in India entirely.

Next speaker was Amit Pande from Oracle. Topic for him, "Enterprise 2.0". Interestingly he made is clear that he is not going to talk about anything related to technologies like AJAX or Oracle frameworks. He talked about how organizations should adapt to Web2.0 technologies. Make use of Wiki, social network and others. Some companies have already started working to work towards that is and execs are looking towards adapting that soon. His underlying theme was that Interesting note on design practices

• Be aware of Fad/Utility Ratio
• Best of consumer releam with policy, security and scale.
• Literal translations most of the time do not work well.

Nicest talk as of now at D Camp.

Three touchstones of Interface Design by Harish from One Big Web

Basically you can go through his presentation but the main points that came up were that you should have an interface which is generic, efficient and intuitive. You have to make a good balance of each to get the best product out.

Siddhi from Sliver Stripe Software presented on Programmer Spaces. Peopleware and The Psychology of Computer Programmers were two books that he mentioned . The presentation was basically about how the workplace be organized so that best can come out of the programmers.

Interesting points about time we work

• 30% alone
• 50% with 1 other person
• 20% with more than 1 person.

Schematic Mapping by Arun was the next topic. Interesting thoughts on how to reduce information on maps(may be extended to others) to give actually be more useful. This guys actually made a schematic for Chennai.

Next presentation was by Navneet from Google on User Motivation. Pretty interesting points for ideal process

1. Functionality - Physicality
2. Trust - Safety
3. Social - Belonging
4. Experience - Esteem
5. Pride - Actualization

Bhasker Kode on Overview/Evolution of end-user programming was next to present his ideas. He also is the one doing some interesting stuff at http://returnable.org/.

Two guys from Microsoft(Supreet Singh & Pandurang Nayak) showed up the Silverlight with all the usual jhinga-a-laala. I actually yawned once during this presentation. If you want to attend the Silverlight Design meet, send mail to supr...@microsoft.com.

Basically it was a great time. A lot to learn from there. I met some of the usual people in the circuit and some new ones also. I felt great to hear that some of the good things happening in India. I hope similar things keep happening and thanks to Yahoo! for supporting this initiative.

And if anyone knows of any of the presentations link, please let me know.

• Navneet's Presentation is at http://enterframe.blogspot.com/2007/09/dcamp-bangalore.html
• Harish's Blog has his idea well written at http://www.onebigweb.com/blog/2006/01/03/the-three-touchstones-of-interface-design/
• Siddhi's presentation on Programmer Spaces is here http://siddhi.blogspot.com/2007/09/design-of-programmer-spaces-my-dcamp.html
• 
  Bhaskars Presentation is at http://www.slideshare.net/bosky101/bhasker-v-kode-overview-of-enduser-programming