Last week, I went to BarCamp London. As always, it was a great weekend.
If you’ve not been to something like this before, the idea is that it’s a conference where each attendee contributes a session. There’s no real theme – just talk about something interesting.
You end up with an agenda made up of the interests, hobbies and skills of the random collection of people who managed to get a ticket. It makes for a more varied and eclectic agenda then you get from a traditionally organised conference.
Some of the talks that I went to included:
- A discussion on Secure Coding – thought-provoking
- An overview of CoffeeScript – a language that can be compiled into JavaScript – interesting as I’d not tried it before
- Dom’s experiences in starting an online sweet shop – very funny
- Simon and Nat’s experiences in turning lanyrd from a side project to a start-up – fascinating to hear about pretty much the exact opposite of what I did (going the corporate route!) since we left Uni
- A demo of and discussion about an open source project to create an open source media centre – rethinking TV is an interest of mine
- A Q&A with a couple of Wikipedians – inspiring – I love the idea of Wikipedia but haven’t really felt comfortable to get involved before
- One fan’s interpretation of the Zelda series of games, in an attempt to make sense of them all with a single coherent timeline – mental but fun
- A developer from the BBC talking about how their team does Agile – interesting to see how it compares with us
- “Two security geeks ranting” – I can’t do this one justice – inspired, and possibly my favourite session of the weekend
- A hands-on, code-heavy live demo of how to hack with the Kinect – very cool
- A dry-run of some stand-up material by @lallyd
- A demo of the new APIs and tools for creating Firefox extensions – looks a lot easier than the old ones!
- An overview of work being done for Surrey Police using mobile apps and social media – hadn’t heard of this – sounds promising
- A talk on how to do stuff anonymously on the web – in an era of social media being used to disrupt oppressive regimes and whistle-blow corporate malpractice, this is important
- One person’s experience in improving their productivity, inspired by the Kanban system – unusual
- A discussion about the importance of context when designing user interactions
- A presentation on the Freebase open repository for structured data and more generally about semantic web – I’ve used freebase before, so great to get some background
- A talk about the history of the Zeppelin – bizarrely fascinating
- A talk about the Clock of the Long Now – lunacy
To be fair, as a range of talks, a lot of them are quite geeky. But that says more about my choices than the range available. There were also talks on:
- A beginner’s guide to Absinthe – including tasting
- Basic Italian for techies
- “How to meet Polish female geeks?” – no idea what that was about, but the title got people talking 🙂
- How to make your own jam
- Sculpting using laser cutters
- How to bake a better cake – also including tasting!
- A crash course in how to do cryptic crosswords – I’d seen a bit of this talk at Over The Air – it was brilliant
And loads, loads more.
Why do I go to barcamps? Because it’s fascinating. It’s a way to get exposed to more new things, ideas and projects than you could normally cram into a weekend. And I love that it works because you get such a varied and interesting group of people into one place, and encourage them to share what they know.
If you’ve not been to a barcamp before, you should give it a go. And BarCamp London is one of the best.
Tags: barcamp, barcamplondon, bcl9