I attended my first BarCamp today and I was really impressed. It was a very full day of interesting presentations by a lot of very smart people, the range of topics was really quite startling. I’m familiar with user groups (although I don’t go along to as many nights as I’d like) and they tend to be quite focussed, however today people talked about whatever their current interest is – from Perl 5.1 to hardware devices to MythTV. I was particularly impressed with the support and encouragement attendees gave to speakers. If you’ve never given a public presentation and you’re unsure of yourself today would have been an excellent opportunity.
Like at user group nights and conferences I’m awkwardly shy and awful at striking conversation so I missed talking to a lot of interesting people today. It’s a different mix of people than I’m used to (like the Ruby user group) with a slant towards freelancing and smaller projects which is so refreshing compared to the behemoth corporate beasts I’m more familiar with these days.
Favorite presentations today: Mark Ryall’s Intro to Scala (second time around), and Paul Fenwick on an Illustrated History of Failure (with sound effects).
I winged a short demo of the Rspec Story Framework which is my current shiny-toy-of-the-week. I might have been better placed to answer questions if I’d actually used it in the wild yet…
Don’t miss BarCamp Melbourne 2009.
I’m glad you both enjoyed both BarCampMelbourne2008 and my talk!
– PJF