Up: BarCampBirminghamReports

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:

Organizing a BarCamp:

Links

http://barcamp.org/BarCampBirmingham

http://barcamp.org/BarCampAtlanta

http://tomshiro.org (my personal site)

Picture tags:

barcampbirmingham

barcampbhm