Up: BarCampsOnWheels

BarCampBirmingham

Six hours in a car is not too bad for a chance to see History being Made. When I saw the notice on the barcamp.org wiki for BarCampBirmingham, I knew that I had to go. So I signed up for it, found a rider to help keep me awake for the long drive on I-20, and pointed the Death Wagon west around 15:00 Friday the 25th of August 2006. After a short fumble around Southeastern Atlanta, we found I-20 and headed off for Adventure.

About three hours later, around 17:00 local time, we checked in to our hotel and spent some time napping and playing music before the Big Kick-off Party at Jim'n'Nick's, a popular downtown Birmingham restaurant. At 8 pm, I walked in to the bar and almost immediately met Dimitry Glaskov, one of the co-organizers of the event. On learning my name, he told me that I'd been quoted in the Birmingham Business Journal already. Oh Dear. We went to the back room and met some of the other folks who were involved. There were women there! I was astounded to see not one, but several -- some of whom I learned were actually In the Life! Dimitry and Johna Ludlow, his Partner in Crime, told me that when they started planning BarCampBirmingham back in March, they thought they'd be Lucky to get 10 folks up for it. They were of course very pleased at the 50-person attendance list on the registration page, plus the 30 or so folks who turned out to drink beer and tell lies at the restaurant. By the end of the evening I was a little hoarse from makin' myself heard over the din in the fairly live room, but the folks there were quite impressive -- I talked to IT people from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Southern Company, as well as one lady who'd pretty much independently set up a database-driven website for her secondary school, but still thought of herself as just a Techno-Peasant. Many of the people there were, of course, IT consultants or folks with a Big Idea who were trying to start a company. The brawl broke up about 10:30 and after a few minor adventures driving around downtown we found the highway and managed to get back to our hotel and fall into our beds.

The actual BarCamp started the next morning at 09:00, in the Mountaintop Community Church. This is an enormous Christian church which sits on the top of a hill in Vestavia Hills, a southern suburb of Birmingham. After a short drive through some Generica and up a long winding drive, we found ourselves in an enormous windowed building with a fine view of the wooded hillsides around it. We followed the office-paper signs down to the basement and took our obligatory T-shirts, coffee, and pastries. About 30 other people had turned out for the Camp, and we stood around nervously clutching our coffee cups and making small talk.

The first order of business was to decide what the group would do until 15:00. Everyone who wanted to present took a 5x8 index card, wrote the title of their presentation on it, and taped it to a big piece of paper on the wall. By 09:30 or so, we had a list of about 20 presentations for the two rooms allotted for the Camp. Next, each Camper marked the presentations that seemed interesting. Then, Dimitry and Johna took down the cards and arranged a schedule. With 17 presentations, two rooms, and four hours (we'd break for lunch), each presentation had to take just 30 minutes.

At 10 am, the first sessions kicked off. I stumbled in to a pretty ok session on "Business Process Management", one of the cooler new trends in IT. We listened to a polished --if hurried -- PowerPoint presentation on some of the new ideas in organizing a business to be both flexible and efficient in its use of people, machines, and materials. Roy Massie, our presenter, was with SunGuard, a local IT firm which seemed to be mostly involved with disaster recovery and security in the insurance, banking, and health-care industries. But they're branching out into consulting as well. I was amused to point Mr. Massie at TheDailyWTF.com, which had recently featured a Business Process diagram/program From Hell which had started from many of the concepts he was presenting.

At 10:30, I wound up in the "Ruby on Rails Question and Answer" session in the Big Room, a much looser discussion on the wonders of Ruby on the Web. The Big Room had two large screens at each corner, both connected to projectors and computers, with an IRC Chat taking live notes on the events in the room as they happened. It was most amusing to watch the back-chat happening in IRC even as the speakers were working the crowd. I asked a softball question or two about Ruby on Rails scaling, and then it was time for the next 30-minute session.

The eleven-o-clock session was on Adobe Flex, and while I might not use such a thing I found it among the more interesting ones. Flex is a browser plug-in which allows you to code Flash applications -- it fits into roughly the same niche as JavaScript. Advantages include Flash's ubiquity and standardization, and the ability to integrate 'rich' data and content with Flash -- so, for example, you could have tabs with flaming rotating lables if you wished. The presenter demo ed some impressive database-driven applications which used Flex RPC, a handy tool which makes calling routines living on the web server from the browser simple and transparent to both developer and user. Although parts of the system are Open, the run-time component downloaded to the PC is not, and the IDE runs only on Windows and costs $500. That makes it a bit of a non-starter for me, but I found the concept very amusing.

Next for me was Mario Moore on 'Entrepreneurship', another quite loosely structured discussion on the ins and outs of starting a business in the Birmingham area. This was full of the usual kvetching about finding money and customers, but I had some fun watching the various business-starters maneuvering around each other, much like wary neighborhood dogs.

One of the 'Rules of BarCamp' is that first-time campers Must Present. I had thought about talking on some of my recreational sudoku coding, but finally elected to fall back on what I knew and do a short juggling class. I started out the session by standing in front of the room talking about why you'd want to learn to juggle (the glory, the money, the power, and the girls), but soon got everyone on their feet with props in their hands. The energy in the room changed quickly once we started actually working on something physical, and I think my six or seven students had a good time. Several of them also walked away with enough information in their heads and hands to at least start to learn the basics. I harangued them as well about the lack of a juggling club in Birmingham -- perhaps that will bear fruit.

We communed over catered-in pizza and soft-drinks next. Just after lunch, we all gathered in a courtyard for the obligatory Mass Picture. At 13:00 I went to Bill Abel's presentation on typography. Bill presented material from "The Elements of Typographical Style (Robert Bringhurst), mostly in the form of Rules Not to Break (e.g. "Use at most two typefaces"). These were pretty ok interesting, and I think I'll have to get Bringhurst's book. Some of the historical notes on typefaces were also prety ok fun.

The last session I went to was Dimitry Glaskov's "Beautiful JavaScript" session, another very loose session with Dimitry coding up javascript on the fly to demonstrate some of the language features. This was a great deal of fun, because all of us in the room were looking at and debugging code on a big screen. I learned several JavaScript language features (Anonymous subroutines! Who knew?) pretty painlessly just from trying to be the first to see why stuff didn't work. A courageous performance, by Dimitry, I thought.

After the official camp, everyone gathered in the Big Room, put their name tags in a box, and drew for door prizes. I walked away with a 5-function battery calculator and three pounds of canned coffee. Other prizes included Flex IDE software, a Ruby book or two, and some other less-technical computer books ("PC Annoyances", for example).

At 16:00 local time, we piled back into the car and drove it on back to Atlanta. I staggered to my front door at about 8 pm local time.

Things to Bring to BarCamp:

• Notebook and pencil or other note-taking stuff
• Attitude
• Wireless-enabled computer
• Lots of business cards
• Camera
• At least one interesting thing to present.

Organizing a BarCamp:

• A space is crucial. More small rooms may be better than one big room, as it makes organizing sessions more flexible. Wifi and presentation support (e.g. overhead projectors) are important.

• Once you have a space, They Will Come. Once you have your first sponsor, getting additional sponsors is simple.

• BarCampsOnWheels are intense. One day is probably a good amount for a first one.

• BarCampsOnWheels are local. I was the attendee from farthest away in Birmingham.

• You don't need a whole lot of people to organize. But you do need a core group of three or four. Someone in that group should be more a Management type, as they will have connections which engineers often lack.

Links

http://barcamp.org/BarCampBirmingham http://barcamp.org BarCampAtlanta

Picture tags:

barcampbirmingham barcampbhm

-- CharlesShapiro - 27 Aug 2006