Thoughts from a BarCamper...

Here's my post-con thoughts on BarCampTdot:

Opening & Session 1a: Asterisk

I got there around 11am. David had a label printer (for name tags), and there were free shirts and Ubuntu CDs. I milled around a bit, met a few new people and some friends. Around 11:40, David & Jay brought everyone together for orientation ("bathrooms are up there...", "space is echo-y, so...") then we were off to the first round of talks.

The windows along one wall had become a schedule; blocks of windows were labeled with blocks of time, and individual panes with a simple location. Each block held a post-it, where one would find the name of the talk.

For the first session, I chose a talk on Asterisk, given by Michael Glenn of Radiant Core (and one of the event's sponsors). Asterisk is an open source PBX, or "business-style phone system" - with voicemail, ring groups, and so on. Michael talked about his setup (VoIP line from Unlimitel, phones from Polycom) then started to drift into more technical details of his setup. I decided to put the "open space" concept to work, and drifted off to another talk...

Session 1b: Agile Development

Some friends of mine at Unspace were holding a round-table on "Agile Development Methods", so I jumped in. Of all the sessions I attended, this one felt the most like an "open discussion" - and it was the only one not to feature a projector. Though I wasn't there for the whole thing, it seemed like there was a good deal of back-and-forth, and that Ryan and Pete did a good job of moderating, without dominating the discussion.

Parsing the conversation after, I came to the conclusion that the Agile buzzword masks two phenomenon, really - and only one is a change in the development process. Ryan talked about clients who, at least initially, were reluctant to give meaningful feedback. They (the client) were so accustomed to poorly designed software and/or unresponsive developers that they assumed the resulting product would be bad by default.

That is, I think agile developers spend at least as much time training their clients - to be responsive, to give good feedback, to be invested in the product as much as the developers are. Or, weeding them out - google for "fire your client" some time.

As far as buzzwords go, Agile doesn't really seem "new" to me - it's pretty much the environment found at most newspaper, so it feels quite comfortable to me. Another local Railser, Andrew Burke, who also used to work at a newspaper, agrees with me.

Session 2: The NSA is Spying on You

I didn't have strong feelings about any of the Session 2 options, so I went with the people I know approach. Hampton and Ryan were going to this talk - which I believe was actually titled "Thwarting Network Detection" or something, but it all boiled down to "The NSA is Spying on You. Boo!"

It was basically a couple of cool / punk / hacker guys showing off ethereal. And imploring us to use encrypted IM, and delete our logs. And one guy had some kind of sniffer that could be set to, say, pull down all "jpeg" packets and pipe them to an X11 display. So, every few seconds, we'd see some graphic pop-up, that someone on the local network must've been viewing.

Neat toy, scary government, blah blah blah... next?

Session 3: Java v. Ruby

After a pizza-slice for lunch, it was time for the Java v. Ruby smackdown. Jen  Nolan of IBM presented a series of slides purporting to compare the two, bullet-point style. Except... Well, Jen's a bit more familiar with Java than with Ruby/Rails, and it showed. Assuming there was an advantage to this kind of comparison (more on this in a bit), it would have been more interesting to get someone (like, um, her husband, a prominent local Railser himself?) to provide some pro-Rails bullets.

As it happened, the Railsers in the crowd felt a bit, um, antogonized - only further fueling the "Tastes Great / Less Filling" feel. Example: "So, Java has many-to-many associations, which Ruby doesn't have... What? It does? Oh. Okay..."

The problem is: this isn't a valid way to comparitively evaluate two programming languages. Jen acknowledged that, but then continued on with it anyway. (Truthfully, I should say, Jen did a really good job of moderating the discussion, keeping things from boiling over nicely - but it was the set-up, not the discussion, that struck me as funny.)

Example: A slide showing lists of databases supported - the Java side is a mile long, filled with barely known obscurities, the Rails list has about six entries. (Which is, itself, misleading at best: the Java side lists each DB2 variation separately, but Rails' ODBC drivers - which support a few dozen systems - were an audience-prompted addition.) Thing is, it's not the number of supported databases, but whether or not your database is supported. Or, it's like: the Gap has more sizes of pants than Harry's Big & Tall, but I'll take my six-foot-3 shopping trips to Harry's when I want to buy nice pants.

My favorite quotes, from the discussion:

• Java guy: So, what do you do when you have 1,000 developers working on your code?
  Hampton: I'd shoot myself. No, seriously, that's not the kind of environment I want to work in.
  Pete: The only one benefitting from a 1,000-developer project are companies that stand to make huge profits off of it.
• Ryan, an aside to me: The fact that Rails is only - what? it's been one year since it went 1.0? - the fact that a language that young is strong enough to warrant a "Java v. Ruby" presentation... Java's been around since what? '96?

On the Un in "Unconference"

After the third session, I was having a great conversation with Ryan, Pete and Dan Grigsby and we decided to ditch the rest of the sessions and go have dinner.

And that, in a nutshell, sums up my reaction to the "unconference" aspect of BarCamp: If a conference is characterized by "the most valuable happenings often take place... in the unstructured time between presentations", then an unconference with the same pattern is... what, exactly?

In some respects, I think BarCampTdot was thwarted in this goal by its environs. It was a colder than normal day, and the empty, echoing warehouse space made casual conversation painfully difficult - further enforcing the "shut up and listen to the speaker" model. I saw one talk moved outside, where I guess it was a little easier to hear (though colder).

At the same time, I'm reminded of a concept in game design: the unrule, the rule you shouldn't have to state, but practical experience says you do. Its sort of a cargo cult anti-dote, structurally enforcing "no, that isn't how it works". In this case, David and other organizers spent a lot of energy promoting the "spirit of BarCamp" - which gave off a "present something or don't bother coming!" vibe.

Also: I suspect that the BarCamp model works best with a stronger community - the original seems to exemplify that. The spin-off, DemoCamp, seems to perform better at building a community. Going into BarCamp, I had no idea what kind of group would form. And, indeed, in addition to the Web guys, I met a SFX artist, some apps guys... That kind of diversity is great, but it works against the "birds of a feather" feel of a "community".

Still, in the spirit of "you get out of it what you put in", I got a lot out of BarCamp. I met some great local techies, learned quite a few new tricks, had some fantastic conversation, and got a cool shirt. That's hard to beat.

Permalink