Barcamp 2005
I feel slightly obligated to make a blog post from Barcamp. The only thing I can think to say is that I’m meeting some really awesome people, some with very impressive projects. It was unfortunate I wasn’t able to finish Microseek to demo, but I hope to present it at the next SuperHappyDevHouse. Hopefully, the DevHouse will get some publicity from this event.
Actually, some of the people I talked to said either not to mention them online, or that they couldn’t tell me about their company. You know, stealth mode. I did meet a lot of people that had used or were very interested in Ruby, which I loved talking about. However, as usual, talking was not something I did a lot of.
I was in passive mode unless I fell into a groove on a topic I loved. I had an absurdly fun time talking to Bruce Boston about a topic I haven’t really talked about for a while: massively multiplayer games. He’s the Senior Economy Designer at There. I’ve seen him at some of the DevHouses, but actually, I saw him at the GDC this year in a session about virtual economies.
I really don’t think I can cover the experience in its entirety so far, and there’s still one more day. A couple of projects that stood out today were Pandora and Personal Bee. Pandora is an awesome service that blows all other music recommendation systems out of the water because it’s based on complex musical analysis rather than collaborative filtering. Personal Bee is a great little feed aggregator that has every feature I’ve ever wanted (and more) in a clean and simple package.
There’s been some great talks and some great ideas shared. I look forward to tomorrow. It’s simply amazing. Tons of people are blogging about Barcamp, some of which are A-list bloggers that are here hanging out. People are also taking lots and lots of pictures.