My First Barcamp
Over the weekend, I spent my time at BarCampLondon. For those unfamiliar with BarCamp, it’s described as a free-to-attend weekend unconference for designers, developers and geeks of all types
. I tend to call it geek camp when describing it to people. I’m still recovering from the 35 hours I went without sleep over the weekend so here is a brief summary of the weekend.
The Venue
The venue for BCL7 was the IBM offices in Southwall, London. And very nice they were too. A good selection of meeting rooms ranging from sizes of 60 people right down to 12 people. Top that with loads of seating areas and a canteen that served us some delicious meals and you had an amazing BarCamp venue.
The Talks
All the presentations were around 20-30 minutes long and were on techy subjects such as “Enterprise Software Patterns” to non-techy subjects such as “Art Pet Project – Lego Portrait”. Some notably good ones for me were Anna Debenham’s talk on CSS Nuggets, Natalie Downe’s discussion on recovering from RSI and Richard Quick’s HTML Emails 101. Unfortunately for me though, a lot of the stuff I wanted to listen to shared the same time slots while the stuff I wasn’t so fussed about didn’t. But that happens. Better luck next time to me.
The Evening Entertainment
There was tonnes of geek fun in the evening. For me the pasttime of choice was playing Werewolf. I think we ended up playing till something stupid like 4am in the morning. There were some seriously good players amongst us too.
My Mistakes
The biggest thing I have learnt from the weekend is to plan for the next one in advance. I hadn’t had the time to do my presentation before the event and this cost me sleep and maybe a chance to see a presentation more or two. The next is that Ian Forrester is always the werewolf. I got told this a lot before we started playing but it was amusing how many times it was actually true!
Anyway, hopefully I’ll get to the next BarCampLondon and before then there is also BarCamp Cornwall and perhaps a BarCamp Cambridge I’d have to attend.
Hey Leesy,
It was great to meet you after following you on Twitter for a while! It was my first BC as well, and I think the only thing I would do differently is head home on the Sunday rather than stay the extra night in London, but I’ll know that from last time. I thought your talk was excellent, and that one by Jack Franklin was pretty good
I’ll be blogging as well later so I’ll send the link your way.
Cheers,
Jack.
I don’t think the staying was that bad an idea. I’ll certainly book Monday off next time as I would have liked to stay right till the end but really did need to get back.