Who can conduct a Devcamp?

I liked the recently concluded Devcamp Bangalore well enough to hope for more of its kind. My thoughts about future Devcamps led me to a question: what characteristics should a software company have to organise a successful Devcamp? Based on my inferences I came up with the following criteria.

1. Buy-in from Management. I think one of the factors that worked in favour of Devcamp '08 is the way unconferences tie in nicely with the recruitment and PR strategies of ThoughtWorks. Of course TW is just one example. The necessary precondition is that management should appreciate devcamps and work out ways to use them to help their business plans.

Recruitment is one department that can make obvious use of devcamps. However most software companies in India do little to ensure the actual quality of recruits beyond paying lip service to the "Quality over Quantity" mantra.

The PR value of devcamps may be difficult for traditional managers to understand. The subtle fact is that a well executed devcamp can make a company more popular with discerning developers than full page advertisements in technology magazines ever will.

There is also the question of participation. Unlike with barcamps most managers will find very little to do in a devcamp. The very nature of unconferences will ensure that there is no stage time for top brass who are used to delivering speeches at events organised by their companies.

2. Buy-in from Software Developers. For any company to make its devcamp work its programmers should be actively involved. This in turn requires that developers have an active interest in software outside the demands of daily work. An useful metric would be the number of employees who are involved in open source projects. If a software company cannot muster a dozen developers who work with code of their own interest, let alone contribute to OSS projects, then chances are that devcamps will never be popular in such a place.

3. Infrastructure. Around 200 people turned up for Devcamp '08 and many of them brought their laptops. Besides managing to squeeze all into their main office TW also put up a wireless network and served free lunch and refreshments. I think more people can be counted on to attend future devcamps. Any future organiser should be able to accommodate 200+ attendees and their computing machines.

4. Location, Location. It matters which city and block devcamps are held. In Bangalore the distance from the city centre to the venue will directly affect attendance.

Notes from Devcamp Bangalore

I attended the first Devcamp conducted last weekend at the ThoughtWorks premises in Bangalore. What I liked most about the event was how it stayed more or less true to the goals - developers talking to developers. Unlike in previous barcamps a lot of speakers built their talks around code. Not surprisingly talks involving working code gave me the most returns on investment of time. I do wish some of the talks had gotten more time though. The 30 minute limit on time had a dampening effect on some of the talks. In some cases the speakers managed to get around this by extending their session into the lunch break. Some others booked two consecutive slots but I don't think this would be always encouraged. One way to avoid the problem in the future would be to change the time slots to 45 or 60 minutes.

I found time to attend six sessions. I was very impressed with Ravi's presentation on Monads. Not surprisingly there were a bunch of requests for an encore after his talk.

SRK's work on load testing using Erlang showed a lot of promise. He demonstrated how he was able to harness the unique strengths of Erlang to load test some of his applications.

In spite of my lack of knowledge I could tell that Vivek Singh was on to something with his new tool for testing Windows applications, 'White'. More power to him.

I spoke about my experiences developing a hobby related application using Django. Somehow the projector refused to work with my laptop running Ubuntu Feisty in spite of the best attentions of a system administrator. To be fair mine is an old laptop(4+ years) and I should have ensured beforehand that it worked well with a projector. Nevertheless I hope the organisers of the next devcamp will be a little more *nix friendly :)

Following my misadventures with *nix and projectors I did a quick tally of operating systems. I was surprised to see so many developers running Windows on their laptops. Even those who were working for startups deploying their products on *nix boxes seemed to be using Windows (Vista!). I guess all those photographs of tech events overseas that I have seen are to blame for my wrong expectations ;)

As one of my friends told me, one shouldn't speak for other people - "you should speak for yourself". At that time I didn't quite catch the meaning. I do now. Getting up on stage and showing code forces you outside your comfort zone. So if you commit to something that is just outside your current ability level you need to stretch to do a good job. So I hereby commit to talk about implementing algorithms related to Computer Vision in the next devcamp. See you then.