BarCampRDU has come to a close. I don't know if I can wait another year for it to come again.
I'll just do a rundown of my personal highlights:
Meeting
Rob Zelt and
Brian Hitney at the pre-party. I had a great time talking tech, and hopefully will get a chance to put-up or shut-up in regards to my gripes with
TriNUG. :)
Got to meet Nick of
DisruptorMonkey, and got to say "Thanks!" for his blog posts that I've been enjoying over the past month or two.
Attended my first session, and actually said something - a minor victory. As I learned more and more about the folks attending, I really got to feeling like the only person in the room who wasn't excelling in their field. Thus, it was great to feel I could make even small contributions at BarCamp.
Loved my second session on "
Getting Things Done" - a really fun session, with lots of folks sharing their experiences. I wish it had either been a smaller group, or run for a longer time, as there were a lot of folks with experiences to share.
Next was "What's Stopping You From Starting a Startup" - this started with a good bit of information for starting up your own company, but quickly morphed into it's merged-in session buddy "How About Doing a Start-Up Weekend?". The rest of the hour focused on that concept, which didn't really appeal to me. But, I did get inspired for a later post on the shortcomings I see with that concept.
After lunch, it was a session regarding lessons that can be learned from the Luddites. I think this session lost its way more than once, but it was great to see an off-the-cuff pitch run the whole hour and get some lively participation.
Next was Coder2CTO, a pretty good presentation on the realities of the requirements of the CTO Position. Really good points were made about how it's not the Alpha Coder that gets promoted to CTO, but rather the person who understands the business objectives, how the technology can and does address those needs, and can communicate those issues. A good session, though it did veer into "Startup Funding 101" at the end.
Lastly was Mark Andrews' flamewar-worthy session titled "Why IE Sucks and How You Can Cope". In more even-keeled terms, it was great session about debugging options available to you when IE support matters. He first showed how side-by-side installation with IE 4, 5, 6 (only SP1, though) is possible. Then, we got a guided tour of how almost all the functionality available in Firebug can be gathered up in various tools on the IE side of things. We looked at the
IE Developer Toolbar and
Fiddler. Then there was some time to get into a few nuances of the quirks involved in supporting IE. Definitely one of my favorite sessions of the conference.
Since I had no session to bring, I volunteered. I liked being able to help out with the conference, and get a closer look at what really needed to be done to pull this off. While BarCamp does have this vibe of things getting done because folks roll up their sleeves and do it, the truth is the organizers do way more to facilitate it all getting done. I was glad to be able to help them out. Special recognition goes out to fellow volunteer
Fred Medlin, who seemed to always be there to help out when things needed doing.
This was my first unconference, and I'm definitely coming to the next. For me,
BarCampRDU 2007 was a huge success, and a lot of fun.
posted @ Saturday, August 04, 2007 5:30 PM