Attended my first (as well as DC’s first) BarCamp. It was an awesome experience. Not only did I learn a lot, but I met a great crowd of people. It was fascinating to discover a small but thriving community of similar web-heads, and would kill to do the things some of them do. Who knows, maybe I will.
I decided to give a presentation about the Facebook platform. I think it went well… I ended up preparing a heavily technical presentation, got there, realized that most people were just giving overviews, and ended up breezing through my slides. Hope someone got something out of it. On the plus side, I ended up co-presenting with Nick O’Neill, who runs AllFacebook, one of the top blogs following Facebook, and we talked throughout the day. I have to admit it’s a little wierd to hear real-world discussions focusing on topics and opinions I usually only read about on blogs and such.
Some presentations were heavily planned, and obviously practiced, some were thrown together at the last minute, some were just people messing around on a website, and some were simply open-ended conversations. Since the sessions at barcamps are volunteer-led, you can see what people in a given region are focused on by taking a look at what is being presented. Yesterday ended up being a wide range of things, however many of them were skewed towards web design and ruby on rails. Only one session relating to anything Google (Google Analytics). I guess it’s finally time to stop being stubborn and actually read that rails book :-).
If you ever find a barcamp going on in your area, I strongly encourage you to go… and to toss yourself in the deep end and participate!
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