Blue Bootstrap

What I learned at BarCamp Atlanta

First, thanks to Jeff Haynie, Lance Weatherby, Stephen Fleming, and the sponsors - Appcelerator, Microsoft, Peer 1, ATDC, Convergence Acceleration Solutions Group, and Georgia Tech Venture Lab - for a great BarCamp. I had a great time, met a lot of interesting people, and learned a lot.

Here's what I learned:

• Fold the corners of business cards for people you meet and want to contact afterwards.
• I've always been skeptical of agile development processes but after hearing a great speaker talk about his success in implementing agile & test driven development processes at a development center in Thailand I'm going to learn more. The same speaker also talked about the problems of setting up an offshore development center. The main point I took away was that a lot of the difficulties are cultural and in Thailand's case, the fact that computers & the Internet have only recently penetrated the country.
• Appcelerator looks hot. Jeff has been busy working on it for a while and at first I thought it was a Ruby thing and to be honest I have no interest in learning Ruby. However, after seeing a demonstration, I'm hooked. It allows a programmer to create nice, feature-rich web applications without a lot of server-side or client-side code. I'm anxiously awaiting for Appcelerator to be released so I can put it into Blue Violin and solve some of the UI weirdness it currently has.
• I decided to "camp" and stay overnight. Some of the most interesting discussions occurred later Friday evening and were mostly focused on what we should build for StartupWeekend. Interestingly, the poker chips I brought went unused.
• 70% of the people at BarCamp were using MacBooks and among the college crowd, it was about 90%. These are the people who are building the current & next generation of software and they've voted for their preferred platform - Mac OSX and the web.

Thanks to everybody who attended - it was a pleasure to attend.

BarCamp Atlanta - Saturday

It's a brand new day and we've started out with a good presentation on Second Life.

Turnout seems a bit low so far this morning. I'm hoping more people show up later.

[Update: 10:49am]

Very good presentation by Stephen Fleming on raising venture capital. Good tips on what not to do to increase your chances on getting a meeting. I'm trying to find a link to his presentation but I'm not having any luck so I'll link to it later.

Currently listening on how to build Firefox extensions. Eclipse has an extension (XulBooster) to make it easier. From my own experience on building a Firefox extension, this is much easier.

BarCamp Atlanta - Friday night

I'm here at BarCamp Atlanta. We had a good dinner of BBQ and cole slaw and started the sessions at 8 o'clock. I gave my presentation on advanced JavaScript and it seemed to go over well. My presentation focused on object-oriented JavaScript which isn't well understood even by some very good developers. I'll put the presentation online or better yet, I'll write a series of blog postings going into further detail.

I'm currently at the Facebook application development presentation and this room is packed - we had to move 3 times to get to a room to hold us all.

If you can't tell, I'm very pumped about the weekend and can't wait to see what everybody else is developing.