My First BarCamp

Posted by Neil Crosby on November 29, 2007 11:45 AM

This last weekend I attended BarCamp London 3, at Google’s Headquarters. Even though I’d managed to get tickets for the previous two I’d wussed out at the last minute, thinking that I hadn’t got anything of worth to add to the proceedings. Well, the first time I also had the fact that it was going to be the first full weekend that my then girlfriend (now fiancée) Becca and I were going to have had together for about 3 months. The point is, this was my first one.

I’ve got to say, I had fun. I stayed up all night with David and presented my talk about automating TV downloads first thing on the Sunday morning bleary eyed but to what I like to think were a receptive audience. I’ll be putting an expanded version of my notes from the talk up in a couple of days so that people can make use of, and expand on, my technique.

Over the course of the two days I attended a good number of talks, and all had something to learn from. Some were rehashes of previous talks that their presenters had done, some were brand new, but all were good. I met a lot of new friends, including Emma Persky, Paul Johnston (not the “award-winning Scottish crime writer”), Reinier Zwitserloot, Jessica Meats, David Recordon, Gareth Rushgrove (whose “web geek” moo card gets pride of place on my desk at work) and many others. If you see this and remember me but I haven’t mentioned you then please comment! A non-mention pretty much means you didn’t give me a card. It’s nothing personal, I’m just absolutely terrible with names.

One of the most interesting talks I went to was a round table discussion about whether we should design sites primarily for the iPhone or not. My stance was that we shouldn’t, but that we should put the time that would have been spent on that into developing good mobile websites. At the end of the talk we were asked if any of us who didn’t already have one were planning on buying an iPhone. I, like everyone else in the room, said that I wasn’t. On monday I bought one. I’ll be blogging about it on Everything is Rubbish in the next couple of days.

So, that was BarCamp London 3. A great experience, and I’m really llooking forward to the next one. I hear there are rumblings about one being held just down the road from me in Oxford?

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