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BarCamp Birmingham

Woo hoo, I’m posting again. I’m not going to make any promises to any continued productivity in this area. My jobs have been keeping be very busy recently. However, I was able to take time this past Saturday to go to the first ever BarCamp for Birmingham.

The first question most people have is “BarCamp?!?!?” no, it’s not where I’ve learned to improve my abilities in making a Blue Cosmopolitan. The name actually comes from the terms “foo” and “bar” which are common placeholder names in computer programming. BarCamp was started last August in Palo Alto, California, as an alternate to FooCamp which O’Reily organized and was invitation only, which I won’t go into here.

BarCamp is an “unconference.” It’s a conference without a schedule, at least without one until everyone shows up. Everyone is expected to participate in some way. Whether by presenting or by asking questions. This is the most difficult part for me, as I’m a fairly introspective individual. I did try to make some points in one of the smaller talks, so, hopefully, I’m covered.

Due to being up until the wee hours of the morning with an email server install the night before, I arrived in Birmingham about an hour into the proceedings. Which just meant that I missed the organizing of the two tracks of 30 minute talks. The highlights for me were the Ruby on Rails Q&A, Typographical Style for web development, and beautiful javascript.

Between being dead tired and my usual shyness I didn’t introduce myself to very many people, but I did meet Bill Abel from The Slaughter Group. In fact, when he told me where he worked I think I had a blank look on my face, I thought he said he worked for the Sauder Group, and I told him I’d never heard of that. Once I thought back on it, I realized what he’d said. Bill, yes, I’ve heard of the Slaughter Group. I had a tour of Slaughter-Hanson back in the early nineties, while I was in college. That was one of the places, along with every issue of Communication Arts, that really put a fire in me for design.

I had hoped to meet Jeremy Flint since he’s how I found out about BarCamp by stumbling across his website recently. However, Jeremy had to be out of town that day, but he was able to video back in with iChat for the closing.

Be sure to check out the photo group at Flickr. And specifically this one that shows my less-than-better-side.

I hope to make it to the next one too. I think I heard that they will try to organize the next one this spring. Thanks to all those who worked so hard to bring BarCamp Birmingham together. I think it was a success.