dale lane

I’m home from BathCamp – the Bath barcamp. I don’t have a lot to say about it, but wanted to post a quick thanks to all of the organisers.

This was my first barcamp outside London. I mainly went because Bath is my old Uni town, and any excuse to go back is always good. But I’m really glad I went – and will definitely be looking out for more non-London developer events.

A few random thoughts from my sleepy brain…

del.icio.us pecha kucha: ten seconds to describe each of the last ten pages that you’ve saved in del.icio.us. Similar to delicious.salted.com but driven by a Python script, we took turns to give it our del.icio.us username, and each of our last ten saved webpages were opened in turn and displayed on a big screen. Very neat idea, and one that I will have to steal at some point. It makes for a fascinating geeky ice-breaker.

I loved the chance to chat with a No2ID volunteer. I’ve never really been convinced by the arguments I’ve heard against a national identity card – they’ve always sounded like arguments against doing it badly, rather than why we shouldn’t do it at all. So it was fascinating to have a couple of people take the time to explain some of the concerns to me.

We won one of the coolest prizes I’ve seen in a while: a fifty billion Zimbabwe dollar bank note. It’s one of the ones printed before they lopped a bunch of zeroes off the end of their currency, so it’s got an interesting history. Cool.

Despite worrying that CurrentCost might be old news now, my talk was surprisingly well-received. It seemed to capture some people’s imagination, and refired my enthusiasm to try some new ideas with my recent CurrentCost app.

A great talk on LEGO. Different to Roo’s talk at interesting, this was an insight into the geek community that has grown up around LEGO. Very, very funny. And fascinating – I had no idea that there was so much to it. These LEGO fans take their stuff very seriously!

I’m massively ignorant about modern web-development techniques. A recurring theme in discussions throughout the weekend was the merits of one web development framework over another. I’d not even heard of many of these before, let alone tried them. This is something that I need to do something about. I went to talks about three of them in particular (django, CakePHP and Symfony) and was fascinated by the potential of all three.

Big thanks to all the organisers for putting on a great weekend. 🙂

Tags: barcamp, bathcamp, bathcamp08

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 8:59 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.