I was camping @ Pune Barcamp4 on 16th Feb

It’s always been a great experience to be at Barcamp.

PuneBarCamp4 was at ThoughtWorks.

I landed up at 11.15am & got my self registered.

The sessions were in full swing. I attended Ajax session which was presented by Atul and Sumit. When they were taking questions from the audiences I went ahead asking them if they could tell some drawbacks or limitations of AJAX. Some of my misconceptions were cleared when Tarun , Atul and Sumit tried answering my question.

Followed by which I attended a session on Why Ruby presented by Sidu.

He got us introduced to Ruby as:

• A very simple & easy programming language
• Strongly & dynamically typed language
• In Ruby every thing is an Object – Classes too
• JRuby for Java Developers & IRuby for Dot Net Developers are more stable compared to Ruby.
• InBuild classes can be reopened.

No doubt Ruby makes life of the programmers easy but at the end let’s not forget that will have to compromise on the Garbage collection & Platform dependence.

After having a wonderful lunch I walked in for a Demo on Webaroo2 by Kiran Thakkar.

Will soon come up with a post on Webaroo2

When Tarun was shooting he asked me about my experience of being at barcamp I said

“I really enjoy being here as we get to meet & interact with like minded people about whats new & hot in the IT World. It is far better then a class room teaching as it has no code of conduct or rules to be followed. Less of theory & more practical overview about tools & technologies.”

For those who couldn’t make it up for puneBarcamp4 –

barcamppune

Photos on – http://flickr.com/photos/barcamppune/

& Videos are uploaded at - http://youtube.com/barcamppune

Great Kick Start ……………Day 1 @ NGO

Can you think of working in an organization which has satisfaction, fun, enjoyment, entertainment in its job profile? Yes those organizations are NGO’s which are driven by its visions & mission to server the society with out accepting any thing in return.

Great Foundation is one such organization

http://greatfoundation.org/

One of the activities undertaken by great foundation & of which I am a part is where we visit Municipal school & help the kids to speak & be fluent in English as their education background is all in Marathi & when they step out of school they find English very complex to deal with.

My team members are :

Arthur Ignatius - SIMS

Nina Gir- Career Forum

Sunil Goel- Career Forum

Dilraj Rehal- IT Recruitments

Jaslene Bawa- Value Notes

We decided to kick start on 9^th Feb from Mahadji Shinde School

We all members meet at the school sharp at 7.45am.Landed up at principle’s office where she gave an overview of the kind of students she has in 8^th Std.

As soon as we entered into the class all the kids stood up wished us “Good Morning Teacher”। Hey I used to do this in school …….but never thought that a day will come when some one will wish me so:)

I was accompanied by Arthur & Nina.We were addressing 60 students having equal no of boys & girls.

We introduced our self & asked each one to introduce them self.Some were very loud but majority of them were shy.Our target was to create a comfort zone so that they can open up & be more confident.

We told them that we will be with them every sat & will be playing some games, giving some assignments which will polish there communication skills in English.When Nina asked them, do they find this interesting & useful?

One of the girl said yes……."Because today English is a powerful language & if we want to progress & make our parents & country proud we must master it”

We started playing dumb charades having two teams – Boys vs Girls.

We gave them words like (School, Teacher, Books, Success) which they have to inact & the team members should guess the word in English.Girls were very smart compared to boys & at the end of the game girls were leading & good to see every one was involved.

After which we started of with associated words where if I say blue they have to give an English word which they can relate with it

eg Blue – sky, water, color, shirt.

Looking at the response of the class we were surprised. They are so creative & think out of the box.Asked them some GK question & played Tanaji says which they enjoyed the most.

The class was full of laughter & bright faces having a close-up smile on every ones face.

We concluded by

1. Declaring the winning group – Boys won
2. Assignment – Every body has to come with a paragraph from English newspaper which they will be reading it aloud in front of the class.

While saying GoodBy I could read their faces -

Their eyes said - “ All ways be with us, we want to be some thing in life”

Their smile said - “ We enjoyed it”

But if some one could read my eyes at that movement it said -

“My life has become more meaningful. Thanks Kids for adoring, respecting & loving me“