13th April 2010

Barcamp Bournemouth 2

Having been to a few of the 'big' conferences and just returned from SXSW it was quite refreshing to attend a more small scale, local affair. With other barcamp's often being either far away or both far away and starting too soon after work BarCamp Bournemouth made it easy, running over a weekend and being so close!

I must of course say congratulations to the organisers for putting in the effort to provide a free social/conference for up to 100 attendees. No small feat, including organising the venue plus sponsorship for two free meals.

In terms of comparison I would suggest that the small scale nature of the event made it much more of a 'geek social' than a free conference. Which made it a heck of a lot more fun but perhaps less about learning.

I made it to a number of talks including a run through of scala (with some very similar features to .net), a designers do better rant from Rich Quick, partook in a .NET MVC discussion, a number of discussions surrounding the Digital Economy Bill, and an intro to British Sign Language (from Lalita D'Cruze). And yes, I can now sign my name :-)

Off the back of this I looked into what other smallscale events are run in my area:

So will show up to those in due course. I also learnt to play Polarity and Werewolf!

Other Recent Posts

Why you should try to be a middle class developer(16th August 2011)

You may not know this but this blog has been xml based since its inception (in fact there's a longstanding, not yet achieved, task to 'replace' it with a 'better' persistant storage mechanism -- clearly I must agree then, that the perfect is the enemy of the good). But anyway... don't worry. I'm not about to do anotherblogaboutxml.

Falling out of Kindle love(10th July 2011)

While reading a book the other day (C# in depth if you're interested... I'd recommend it to all you .net lovers out there.. yes you.. both of you) I suddenly realised something. I was holding a book.

Last night I dreamt something existed that didn't..(30th April 2011)

Part of my role at Headscape has included looking at our development processes/practices. There's a blog in this (and it's coming soon), but as a brief teaser to that:

SXSW 2011: The tale of the lost man points(10th March 2011)

So we're here... just, but with far less man points than we started... to be fair I think I've lost out to Ryan on this one

The start of a brand new year (2011)(3rd January 2011)

Year in review and resolution posts may seem a bit passe, cliche and anything else that ends in an 'e' that sounds like an 'a'... but let's get one out of our (my) system anyway.