BarCamp Galway - The Aftermath
I went to BarCamp Galway yesterday which was held at Digital Enterprise Research Institute near the city. It was a great event and a lot of fun. Many thanks to John, Conor, Aidan and everyone else who helped plan the day. I'm already looking forward to the next one!
One of the best talks I went to was Tim Bunce's talk on Perl, DBI, DashProfiler and more. I wrote lots of applications in college using DBI and really had a lot of fun working with it, so it was pretty amazing to meet Tim and hear him talk about how Perl6 is alive and well and will "rock my world!"
I also saw an interesting talk by Alastair McDermott about Internet Marketing and one by Jan Blanchard on his company TouristR. I met Jan and his fun team a couple of weeks ago at OpenCoffee, and it was very nice to see him walk through the application - it really looks nice!! I saw some cool features of Ubuntu at James Cooley's talk, and I watched Ina O'Murchu's social web talk which was interesting and definitely entertaining, with a fantastic video about why you should be on linkedin/myspace/etc. The last talk of the day I went to was a panel on startups talking about common issues they hit.
One of the coolest things about this conference for me was the amount on online participation, both from attendees (via jaiku mostly) as well as from those who couldn't make it. Conn did a great job of setting up the live stream on ustream.tv (and our little golf ball mic even got to help out!). At the startup panel, they were taking questions from the audience watching the live stream. During some of the talks in the main room they had the jaiku stream being projected. I guess if you were in one room and realized via people's jaikus that the other talk was more your style or really amazing or something, you could move!
I learned a lot from Tom Raftery's talk about video blogging and was thrilled to learn that he uses a very similar camera to the one I just bought for our team - this bodes well for us! Clare and I and the rest of the Developer & Platform Group are really trying to get a lot of our content on the web in the next couple of months, so the more I can learn from experienced individuals like Tom the better!
Oh yeah, I also got to talk, too - I gave a talk on using dynamic languages with Silverlight. I had a great audience with lots of good questions. This post is long enough, so I'm going to answer them in the next post. Thanks again for your interest and participation, and feel free to contact me with any additional questions.
