Joe’s Amazing Technicolor Weblog

BarCampBoston 3 is where I spent much of this past weekend, and it was a great time. The event had a very relaxed feel, and was full of interesting & friendly folks. Had the experience a number of times of sitting and chatting with some random person about real estate or gardening, and then find out that they played key roles in some major software project that I use every day. This did not happen so much when I lived in Minnesota.

(that’s my laptop, hand, and water bottle in the foreground of the photo. Nice shots of the event, Justin.)

Saturday

Sessions this year were only 30 minutes long (a bit short without downtime between most of them), so it was easy to see lots of different things:

• many-eyes.com an IBM research project, for making a number of interesting data visualization tools easily available for anybody to upload arbitrary data into. Lots of neat examples.
• John Resig ran through the basics of processing.js. Awesome.
• a session on git basics, which was pretty handy for me being at my current point on the learning curve (which is not too far)
• “Rails War Stories” ended up mostly being a “testing lets you develop faster” vs. “testing makes you develop slower” discussion. Great example of how smart, well informed people [which I believe the participants to have been] can hold diametrically opposed views on a topic.
• Although I’ve heard a bit about Amazon Web Services, in particular S3 and EC2, the intro presentation was pretty handy in terms of walking through pixily’s use, and some of the related issues.

Talking Backups

This year, the session organization process felt more open. In particular, there was a dedicated sheet of paper to stick potential sessions onto, which could then get check marks or other feedback from interested people. Since one of my major projects at work these days is putting together a new backup system, I proposed a discussion about open source backup & recovery. Enough folks expressed interest that I went ahead and scheduled it for later in the day, and sure enough we ended up with over a dozen folks.

While I’d worried that backup was a potentially boring subject given the other things going on, folks ended up having plenty to say. It was certainly helpful for me to put my thoughts together for the occasion, and to get feedback on some of the stuff I’ve done and am considering. It was also really interesting to hear about other backup scenarios people had experience with, and some of the other classes of tools that I haven’t really considered for my current purposes.

Sunday

Less people showed up, giving things even more of a laid back feel. We still ate a ton of pizza.

• The topic of hosting email came up a number of times, and the consensus seems to be that there’s generally not much sense in going to the trouble of doing it yourself anymore. No objections here.
• Seeing a demo of fogbugz was pretty interesting, having heard lots about it. Doesn’t sound like a fit for anything I’m working on now, but I can see how it would work for certain orgs. Heard a bit about using trac with distributed VC, which I can more easily imagine, and was interested to hear about the trac fork drproject.
• Really interesting hallway conversation about cloud computing and the end of the relational database. Got turned onto ThruDB, which I hadn’t heard about, and heroku which I had, but hadn’t realized how far along it’s come.
• Hadn’t really been aware of OpenWrt’s progress. Their supported hardware list will now be a research stop before making wifi purchases.

I was able to make it to a good chunk of Barcamp Boston 2 this weekend, and learned some good stuff. Hats off to the organizers for putting everything together, especially considering the challenging weather conditions. Some of the things I picked up:

• OpenID is threatening to pick up enough adoption to be hard to ignore. Still looks like there are more producers than consumers, and I’m not comfortable yet that I understand the trade offs of delegating my ability to log into a wide swath of services (maybe YADIS could be helpful here?).
• Mapping has come a long way. In particular, OpenLayers is being used for some very interesting stuff, for example at the Open Guide to Boston. Advantages over the Google Maps API include openness and ability to do non-point features (like a bike path). Recommended tools also include Quantum GIS, described as something like photoshop on top of a mapping database. Massachusetts, it turns out, is a leader among states in terms of sharing mapping info (other good local resources include Harvard and the metropolitan planning council).
• New respect for the things that can be done with javascript. Including Alan Taylor’s encryption-in-your-browser project, John Resig’s jQuery presentation, the Open Layers stuff, and the guy in the CakePHP session who salvaged some laughs from Nate’s “starts with java” joke. jQuery seems like it’s worth a closer look - I like what I saw of the selector syntax, the ($document).ready(function) hook, and the fact that there’s a lively community and seemingly robust plugin system. Also some good pointers at the end of John’s session to the Selenium IDE, test.simple and Firebug Lite.
• Seems like there’s good potential for some kind of coworking arrangement in Boston. In the meantime, I’ll have to check out Sweet Finnish again.
• The Stata center is a fine place for this kind of gathering. It didn’t even leak!