Craig Rowe
Techlead / Developer
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!
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