BarCampEarthToronto

This weekend, being the one-year anniversary of the very first BarCamp, it was decided to coordinate nearly simultaneous (timezones notwithstanding) BarCamps in a gajillion cities (I think they actually hit 15?) all over the globe. I went to the one here in Toronto. Ryan, Ryan, Maria and the committee did a fantastic job of putting this event together.

BarCampEarthToronto was held in Microsoft’s downtown Toronto office, giving us a large conference room (~50 people) and two smaller meeting rooms (~12 people each). After a quick orientation, we got down to organizing the board (in this case, three easels and some post-it notes.)

I could only stay for three sessions (darn puppy), my three were:

• Networking for Introverts – Sacha Chua organized a great discussion-oriented session, with a fairly self-explanatory title. There were some really good tips shared: Wearing “geek badges” that identify something you’re passionate about & willing to discuss/share (“I ♥ Firefox”, etc.); Positioning yourself in a conversation in such a way as to avoid “closing off” other parties; Offering/Acting as the event host or otherwise avoiding putting yourself “out there” on an individual level… All in all, a really good discussion-oriented event, and a good kick-off to BarCamp, too.
• Why Dynamic Languages – John Lam ran this talk. It was either a plug for Ruby, a plug for his RubyCLR (a .Net plug-in for Ruby, I think?), or a plug for dynamic languages generally. I abandoned this session early – it was too much KeyNote, not enough discussion - or too much persuasion, not enough information, for me, anyway.
• Your Shiny New Tech, or Keeping Up with the Joneses – This was my idea: Find out the new, “shiny” tech stuff that other BarCampers are using to make their lives easier, so that it can start making my life easier, too. I shared FireBug – a Firefox extension for easily debugging Ajax/JavaScript. Someone else shared Selenium – an automated testing suite for browsers/Web apps. We went Google from there, poking around on Spreadsheets (which is much improved since the last time I looked at it), Writely (now accepting new sign-ups), and Chris Messina’s mobile proxy hack.

All things considered, I really enjoyed this BarCamp (a touch more than the last, I think) – met some cool local geeks, learned some neat stuff, and had a lot of fun. I was really sorry I had to leave early, but that’s the way the small puppy bladder works…

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