BarCamp London 8

[squirmelia]

BarCamp London 8 was awesome. Great talks and great people. Not much sleep, drank lots of coffee, and it was quite intense, hearing all those interesting ideas and running between sessions, and reading what was happening in the other sessions on Twitter, and bumping into people I hadn't seen for a few years and meeting new people, and trying to stay awake and not falling behind with NaNoWriMo. I also had to attend a surprise retirement party on Saturday night (still wearing my BarCamp t-shirt, with my Twitter name, etc, on it, in glow-in-the-dark print), and caught up with some of my family then, and ended up accompanying my mum back to Kent (we ate cake and made Kinder egg toys on the train), where I slept for a few hours, then dashed back to London.

I think these were the sessions I attended:

Location Aware Services - A useful idea or an invitation to get burgled?
The secret life of bees (bee-keeping)
Set, Sugru and Fluxx (played a game of Set; got given a sachet of Sugru)
Hack 3D (3D photography; viewed a stereoscopic image)
Running meetups using social networks (meetup.com, ning, etc)
Books for freaks (book recommendations)
How photographs tell stories
Beautiful Code (coding standards; tabs vs spaces)
What's wrong with "it just works"? (whether computers can or should be consumer devices. Mac vs Windows.)
Let's get.. antisocial (ASCII art; demo scene; is using Twitter ever creative?)
Why online social media isn't a new thing (dial up BBSes; Fidonet; Monochrome BBS)
What has porn done for us, and should we be grateful? (would you work in the porn industry? does porn still help to drive technology?)
Cupcakes (cupcake decorating and eating; discussions about cookery and one girl's addiction to dettol)
Culture Hacking (flash mobs, hack spaces, pop up shops)
A rough intro to User Experience Design
Photography is not a crime!!
What kids are doing in ICT in schools today

If you're interested in reading about what other sessions were on, or even seeing videos of the talks or slides, some are available on Lanyrd.

Comments

[shermarama]

I have no idea how well-known Mono was outside of people that were long-time users, but in my head I imagine it being completely unknown outside of word of mouth about it. Who was talking about it?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Tilt (Glenn) did the presentation. We had discussed it beforehand on Mono. :) Part of the reason the talk happened was to try to attract a few new users, and also because it started at City University, which was where the BarCamp was held.

There were at least a few people there who said they had heard of Mono, but yes, I am unsure how well-know Mono is really.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

This all sounds really great! But please tell more about the addiction to dettol - did it start with having a bath in dettol? The smell of dettol = totally natsukashii man. I wonder if grown-ups are allowed to bath in Dettol. I have some fancy "bath foam", which does smell lovely, but it's not the same...

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if the woman running the session did bathe in dettol, but she seemed to really love the stuff, and even went for a job interview with them and told them she would be happy to wear an "I love Dettol" t-shirt, or something. :)

[nickmurdoch.livejournal.com]

From what I've heard it sounds like I should definitely go to the next one! I've signed up to their mailing list now.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Indeed you should go! It was fun.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I can't go to BarCamp: I program in VBA and that means I'm Not A Proper Geek.

Sounds interesting though.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

You don't have to tell anyone about VBA!

I went to a lot of sessions that weren't really that geeky, to be honest.

[pplfichi.livejournal.com]

My computing A-level was the last year (2000) whatever exam board did one where you had to design and program something. My teacher was lamenting how they were turning it into something completely useless, like the rest of the ICT syllabus.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I am quite confused by it all, as I am old and out of touch with what is taught at schools, but yes, it does seem like that!

Just found this, which talks about A-level computing and was pretty much what was said in the talk, although the presenter concentrated mostly on talking about A-level/GCSE ICT as opposed to Computing, which I thought might be different, but I guess not!
The state of A level computing (http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.19144)

[pplfichi.livejournal.com]

Depressing reading is depressing :/

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I guess at least kids know more these days, despite that!