BarCamp Cork III Review

I had a fantastic weekend in Cork this past weekend for the third annual BarCamp Cork.  Well done to Gordon Murray, Ciara Feely, Ciara Crossan, and everyone else involved!  The crowd was excellent, and I met lots of new people and caught up with familiar faces, too.  Plus, I love the Cork International Airport Hotel as a venue, it is a very funky hotel. 

The schedule for the day was great, with quite a varied selection of topics from communicating with customers to OpenStreetMaps, defamation to Erlang and lots in between.  I started the day at Tamas Nagy’s talk on Erlang, which covered the history of the language and some syntax for Erlang.

I’d pretty much travel anywhere to hear Sabrina Dent speak.  The reason I like listening to Sabrina has nothing to do with her beautiful slides nor her concrete examples of successful approaches to design and marketing.  It has everything to do with the fact that she does not mince words.  If you’re speaking with Sabrina Dent, you know that she’s telling it as it is and not sugar-coating the situation.  That kind of honesty is rare, and I always value hearing her take on things.  She also happens to be a lot of fun. 

Defamation is one of those things that many people online today don’t think about until they either are confronted with the issue themselves or hear a frightening story that hits close to home.  Fergus O’Rourke led a very engaging discussion on defamation issues with several local stories as examples.  I am looking forward to seeing his slides as I missed the presentation & only got to hear the discussion afterwards.

I was delighted to finally meet Paul Sweeney after being very impressed with his company, VoiceSage, for some time now.  Paul gave a great talk about communicating with customers, issues that his customers commonly run into, and how technology can save them a lot of money.  Also looking forward to seeing Paul’s slides, as they weren’t playing nicely with the laptop in the room.

One really interesting talk I went to was more of a discussion led by John Dennehy and Donagh Kiernan on the Dot Com Boom & Bust.  It was a great overview of the craziness of the time, and they covered a lot of the lessons learned in their organizations and start-ups.

At Elly’s ergonomics and stretching talk, we got out of our chairs and learned some very helpful poses and stretches to reduce our chances of stress injuries.  Elly knows her subject.  I am often guilty of sitting incorrectly, so this was really useful.  I was delighted to learn that wearing shoes with heels at my desk can help make sure my posture is correct.  Or at least that’s what I think I heard.  :)

Simon Whelband, who has a lot of experience working with teams all over the world, spoke about some of the difficulties of outsourcing and how to overcome those challenges.  One of my favourite questions of the day was from this session, and it’s something I have attempted several times to describe in various blog posts: “Are there cultural differences in working with two different, native-English speaking countries?”  The answer was a resounding yes, which has, of course, been my experience as well.

I gave my talk at the very end of the day, and I talked about building multi-touch applications.  It was a toss up for me between robotics versus multi-touch, but as my Dell Latitude XT2 arrived last week, I had to go with multi-touch.  My slides are below, and I’ve taken out the images for which I don’t have distribution rights.  The videos I used are from http://sarcasticgamer.com.  The Future Vision one is here and the Surface one is here.  Yes, they are parodies, but they are really well done.

Thanks to everyone who came along and made BarCamp Cork a great success!