Saturday, March 05, 2005

The BangPypers

First of all, the introduction -> The BangPypers are a group of Python enthusiasts in the city of Bangalore where I live.

How did BangPypers come into being? It all started on Dec 27 2004, when I was browsing the Daily Python Url blog and saw a post mentioning that "Chennai Python Meetup is on...". I followed the link and found out about the Meetup.com site. I was surprised to learn that there were already many Python meetup groups at the site http://python.meetup.com. Well I mused that if the Chennaites can come up with a Python meetup group, the Bangaloreans can come up with one too and do it in a better manner, considering that Bangalore is the tech hub of India.

I scourged the python meetup site for any Bangalore Python meetup groups. There was one, a dysfunctional group that called themselves "Bengalru Python meetup group" with 5 members and looking for an organizer. I initially joined them and posted a message.

The next day, I checked the site. There was no reply for my post and I realized that the group was quite dead. Bengaluru might be the original name of Bangalore in Kannada, but it is of course more popular and better known as "Bangalore" itself.

I created the "Bangalore Python meetup group" on Dec 28. The first few members to join were my friends who I invited - Anish Damodaran, Indrajith. I also sent an invitation to Premshree Pillai and posted in comp.lang.python about the news.

There was good response over the many days that followed with 16 members joining till Jan 7 2005. Swaroop published about the group in his blog on Jan 7th and the response increased, which shows the popularity of his blog. I have captured some interesting statistics on this in a post to the BangPypers group.

We had the first meeting at Ebony Restaurant, Barton Center, M.G Road on Jan 22nd. 10 guys including me attended. We decided to form the Yahoo! group and also a website. The idea for Project Uraga was also born. It was a fun night, though I had some personal expenditure which I expect the group to make up over time. :-)

I created the Y! group with the name "BangPypers" on 24 Jan 2005. We have a lot of activity in the group and it still must be one of the Yahoo! groups with the highest traffic. The group currently has 75 members most of who are in Bangalore. There are a sizeable number of non-Bangaloreans too. The first month had 101 messages, Feb had a whopping 364 messages! March has just started and we already have 25 messages over the last 4 days.

We had the first "technical meetup" of the group at ThoughtWorks on Feb 19 2005. You can read all about it here .

A website at http://www.bangpypers.org is also registered. Many thanks to Ramdas S of Developer IQ for doing the same. The website work has not started off however. We also have a Google group of the same name. All posts to Y! BangPypers gets mirrored to the Google BangPypers.

If you love Python and you are a Bangalorean, you should join BangPypers :-) . Well, you are invited to join even if you are a non-Bangalorean. BangPypers is the second biggest Python meetup group in the world, so we are on the world-map of Python, just like Bangalore is on the world-map for technology.

6 comments:

Siddhi said...

Cool! Didn't know there was a python group in Bangalore

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