Skip to main content

BlogCampPune

Attended (and partly managed/mismanaged) BlogCampPune on Saturday. I am happy we organized an event for bloggers in Pune. This medium of expression and conversation has a lot of potential.

People often point out that individual blogs (those who rant about toothpaste and the like) are doing more harm than good by cluttering the internet. But I think otherwise. There are real gems written by people who have some meaningful stuff to share. But besides sharing, a blog is a medium for individual expression. It's like having a conversation in the ether... you are generally talking to anyone who is interested... and anyone who is interested responds back. Writing also has the potential to guide a person towards personal development. Blogging also enables grassroots journalism. So, all in all, I think blogging is an excellent medium, and I'm glad BlogCampPune happened.

Overall the unconference was pretty good. I admit, wi-fi sucked, as did the presentations by some people who did not realize that one does not do blatant advertising in an unconference. Next time... please sell your wares by empowering people and not by boring them :-)

Among the sessions, I enjoyed the talk by Melody, and the discussion on old vs. new media. Some interesting thoughts there.

CNBC interviewed me, but I have no clue when they will air the 2 minute snippet.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Commenting your code

Comments are an integral part of any program, even though they do not contribute to the logic. Appropriate comments add to the maintainability of a software. I have heard developers complain about not remembering the logic of some code they wrote a few months back. Can you imagine how difficult it can be to understand programs written by others, when we sometimes find it hard to understand our own code. It is a nightmare to maintain programs that are not appropriately commented. Java classes should contain comments at various levels. There are two types of comments; implementation comments and documentation comments. Implementation comments usually explain design desicisions, or a particularly intricate peice of code. If you find the need to make a lot of implementation comments, then it may signal overly complex code. Documentation comments usually describe the API of a program, they are meant for developers who are going to use your classes. All classes, methods and variables ...

Inheritance vs. composition depending on how much is same and how much differs

I am reading the excellent Django book right now. In the 4th chapter on Django templates , there is an example of includes and inheritance in Django templates. Without going into details about Django templates, the include is very similar to composition where we can include the text of another template for evaluation. Inheritance in Django templates works in a way similar to object inheritance. Django templates can specify certain blocks which can be redefined in subtemplates. The subtemplates use the rest of the parent template as is. Now we have all learned that inheritance is used when we have a is-a relationship between classes, and composition is used when we have a contains-a relationship. This is absolutely right, but while reading about Django templates, I just realized another pattern in these relationships. This is really simple and perhaps many of you may have already have had this insight... We use inheritance when we want to allow reuse of the bulk of one object in other ...

Planning a User Guide - Part 3/5 - Co-ordinate the Team

Photo by  Helloquence  on  Unsplash This is the third post in a series of five posts on how to plan a user guide. In the first post , I wrote about how to conduct an audience analysis and the second post discussed how to define the overall scope of the manual. Once the overall scope of the user guide is defined, the next step is to coordinate the team that will work on creating the manual. A typical team will consist of the following roles. Many of these roles will be fulfilled by freelancers since they are one-off or intermittent work engagements. At the end of the article, I have provided a list of websites where you can find good freelancers. Creative Artist You'll need to work with a creative artist to design the cover page and any other images for the user guide. Most small to mid-sized companies don't have a dedicated creative artist on their rolls. But that's not a problem. There are several freelancing websites where you can work with great creative ...