Saturday saw my own, and Sydney’s, first ever Bar Camp. I’d gone with very few expectations (mainly because of the hectic lead up to WebJam2); to interact with other Sydney geeks, meet some new faces and to come away inspired—boy were they met and exceeded.
For those unfamiliar with a Bar Camp, it’s an adhoc gathering of people, who’ve arranged to be at the same place, at the same time, and given enough resources (pen, paper, lounges and some rooms with projectors and seats) to share ideas, opinions and experiences about anything from Life as an Expat to Google-level-performance for web applications. The session timetable is made up as the day goes by—just whack your piece of paper on the board and you’ve got 20+ keen ears and opinions.
Mick from Tangler kindly arranged sexy CampBar tees whilst a bunch of Aus’s hottest startups funded other, less fasionable, activities:
Gavin has a great writeup covering pretty much all of the sessions I participated in. Google-style MapReduce scaling (which reminded me not to scare from the challenge of solving hard problems), OpenID (which I’ll be integrating into various apps coming up so I can join in the conversation), microformats, and agile development (the sort of thing I’ve been involved with at my new position at Job Futures).
Unfortunately I missed out on Lisa’s usability talk and Mike and Martin’s talk on lesson’s learning from starting their own companies, which both looked awesome. In hindsight I also would have loved to start a talk “Rails: agile, in practice” highlighting some of the agile practices the Rails community encourages, and get feedback from how others are working on the web.
A great day and night—I can’t wait until the next Barcamp Sydney sneaks it’s head around the door!
Archived comments
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Sounds awesome. One of many things to look forward to when I return to Oz in August (though to Brisbane; but Sydney’s just down the road, surely…)
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Hey, nice post. It was a good day. Met some good people. Sydney is picking up pace.
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will have to catch the next one for sure! sounded great judging by all the feedback from everyone.
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Yeah it was such a shame I missed it, I was really looking forward to it.
Next time for sure.
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Mate – it was good meeting you. See you at the next one!
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I’d fly up for the Brisbane one if you’re up there Nic; assuming, that is, that they’re not on the same day.
The rest of you definitely have to go next time—not even a BBQ and O/S trip is a good excuse! :)
Ah so you found me Elias. Now I get to RSS stalk you, and see just how small this world really is.
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Well I actually just RSS added you to stalk you, and came across an article about Myles Byrne…I went to school with a Myls Byrne…
We are going to have to complete our chat over another beer!
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Looking forward to your talk on “Rails: Agile in Practice” at the next BarCamp!