First-ever PipesCamp held in India (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)

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YDN YDN Blog First-ever PipesCamp held in India

Yahoo! Developer Network Blog

January 4, 2008

First-ever PipesCamp held in India

The first PipesCamp unconference was held in India in late December. The event was organized independently by "technopreneurs" Prabhu Subramanaian and Bhasker V Kode, also known as Bosky, and sponsored by their partner Arun Prabhudesai of hover.in.

"It'll be interesting to bring the community together and just see can be hacked up, track work being done , and generally see how yahoo! pipes could churn out some amazing hacks and brilliant applications for bloggers, developers and end-users - at the same.
What: unconference for yahoo! pipes hackers and hobbyists. sessions, workshops and a "hackday" for showcasing pipes.

Why: why not! building a community around the yahoo! pipes enthusiasts, share ways to maximise the power of the utility itself, learn how your favourite pipes are built, show off neat tricks of your own , and spread some "pipes" love to the community."

The event included some presentations and time for collaborative hacking and demos. RL.Narayana of Equvia Webservices gave a presentation about the Mashup Economy:

Several very cool Pipes came out of the event. The first presented was Ego Search, a pipe for finding out how popular you are on the web. Then came Siddharta Govindaraj's MTC Mashup.

"You can type a bus number in the input box on the top and it displays (or tries to display :P) the places visited by the bus on a map.
The raw data comes from the Chennai MTC website (Yes, they have a website). There is a section that gives the stages visited for the bus number that you enter in a form. However, the output is quite a messy bit of HTML, quite a pain to parse through. Luckily, Rabin Vincent has taken this data and put out a much cleaner bus query interface over it."

You can read the play-by-play of the event here . There's also a new Yahoo! Group for past and future PipesCampers and a Flickr photostream of the event.

(via Pipes Blog. Photo by srinieth)

Matt McAlister

Posted at January 4, 2008 2:13 PM

Comments

this was my first introduction to pipes and as an IT business person I realise the potential of it... I got a few of the techies to make me understand what it can do and when I saw a few examples I got even more excited... am already researching a few things that can be done out of this and will be practical for the community but I am finding it hard technically so will be touching base with any one of you guys to get some help!
Congrats on being the first one in India to take this step
rbhadani@gmail.com

Posted by: Rajat at January 4, 2008 5:57 PM

It was indeed fun playing with yahoo pipes. True to the pipes spirit, reusing Siddhi's MTC mashup and rendering it as KML in Google Earth was easy cake walk, yet created a good visual impact.

In my experience, some of the building blocks return output as one type(say RSS), whereas other building blocks expect strings or numbers(strongly typed) nature of Yahoo Pipes is not going well with the visual design interface. And alternative command line interface IMO will improve productivity. I'm yet to figure out how to pass one Yahoo pipe as input to another yahoo pipe and chain them( first class?)

Good work Hover.in keep it up.

Posted by: Balaji Sowmyanarayan at January 4, 2008 6:52 PM

Thanks Yahoo for the mention about this unconference. We just planned this unconference out of our own interest and we hardly gave a week's time. But a good number of bloggers/hackers/entrepreneurs turned out for the event and the energy level they showed where just unbelievable. Special thanks to the Pipes team as well.

A hack event which we held in the afternoon also had a good reception with a number of firt timers trying out a pipe based on what they learnt in the morning. We had also held a discussion with a panel comprising of bloggers, freelancers, techies and collected their views and feedbacks about pipes and have sent this to the Pipes team already. Even the pipes team have acknowledged that some of those suggestions to be valuable.

Overall, it was fun and a good learning experience for everyone and we hope to see a bigger community and hope to organize more such camps in the future.

Happy Piping.
Prabhu

P.S: Dont forget to join our pipesCamp yahoo group

Posted by: Prabhu at January 5, 2008 5:49 AM