Geeks Day Out

It was a foggy Saturday morning on 11th Feb and geeks from all around Bangalore headed to SAP Labs for the 11th edition of BarCamp. With around 600+ people registered for the event, it was a day destined to be exciting and eventful. For me, it was the first time I was attending the event. Being in Bangalore for so many years, it was weird why I missed it all the time.

There were talks on almost every topic that concerns the geek in each one of us - Electronic Product design, User Interfaces, Programming languages, Cloud, Mobile, Web, and everything that matters. There were even sessions on Cooking, Interactive Fiction and guess what.. Hypnosis. Wow!

I was blown away with the variety of information flowing around in all directions. The venue of SAP Labs was an awesome stage to host the geek congregation.

The event also marked my first stint as a speaker at BarCamp. I was talking on the topic close to my heart - How to enchant the audience with your presentation. Being in software business for sometime, I was surprised how bad presentations really are. Each day people all around the world, people spent time listening to presenters that bore them to death with their slides and speaking skills.

It intrigued me for a long time till I took a shot at it. I have been a passionate speaker since my college days. Me and my gang going around the colleges in Bangalore evangelizing technology. It was a tough task but something that taught me a lot on how to enchant the audience.

Lately, I have been talking to groups helping them become good speakers and create enchanted presentations. And BarCamp was a perfect opportunity for sharing this to a wider audience. The session was titled : Don't just Present, Enchant

The crowd was brilliant. I was surprised to see so many people turn up for the session even when there were so many good sessions running in parallel. The session turned out to be a good venture for me. Loved every bit of interaction from the audience. I want to have a separate post just on the topic summarizing the presentation.

 I was happy to see so many enchanted faces and loved the feedback I received about the session. Some of them are mentioned below :-

Please Note: I have hidden the twitter handles to protect privacy of the audience. 

Thanks again to all who turned up for the session. It was a great learning experience for me. And Thank you BarCamp Bangalore.