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Barcamp Liverpool 2011-11-19

Barcamp Barcamp Liverpool
on November 19th, 2011 by - No Comments

Well, what can I say, the day didn’t get off to the best start when  our train to Liverpool was cancelled. This resulted in a half hour wait and a full train to Manchester with a quick jog between platforms at Piccadilly station.

Barcamp Liverpool was taking place at DoEs Liverpool. The event has been run over two days, Friday 18th and Saturday 19th november.  Saturday had a good turn out with about 40-50 people in attendance.

I was lucky  in that @martinwass had been the day before so knew the location of the event.

Once inside, the location provided 3 quite large spaces for talks and also a chill out area where tea, coffee and snacks were available.

Free WiFi was available but it was quite slow.  A nice touch was power strips being laid out between seating so that no one was fighting for the available power sockets.

Sessions were set to 20 minutes each with 10 minutes between sessions. In reality it turned out that all the sessions I went to ended up taking the whole 30 minutes with some actually running over.

The morning simply zipped along, moving from one session to another. The most outstanding talk of the morning was from @teknoteacher about enthusing kids about programming/development. The fact that programming is no longer taught at school, like it was when I was at school (on the BBC computers), is just tragic and something should be done about it. Alan and others, including the BBC, are working towards getting kids interested in programming and looking to get this back in the school curriculum.

Lunch was kindly supplied by the sponsors and gave us all a bit of time to chill out, have a drink and a bite to eat and catch up on emails.

The first session I attended after lucnh was looking at using RFID with your computer or Arduino. I now want to get a reader for my Arduino and start tracking the cat coming in and out of the house. Should be a doddle with the Twitter API for Arduino :o )

The afternoon continued along the Arduino route with a game based on RFID using wav files running over an Arduino.

Automatic testing with Selenium  was next on the list. Selenium allows you to script the testing of browser applications. It also allows you to control remote browsers. Looks like something I’ll have to have a play with when testing my browser apps. I like that it supports quite a number of languages and IDE.

In conclusion, this was a great event and well worth the trip across the hills. Thanks to the organisers for a great day. Hope to see you again for the next one.

 

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A Barcamp Session Wall Application

Barcamp Programming
on November 2nd, 2011 by - 2 Comments

I have thought for a long time that an on-line session wall application for Barcamps would be a great idea. I know other people have also thought this but up to now I don’t know of one actually being used. Here are my ideas on what I think would be needed to make this a viable working system. Let me know what you think.

The application would be hosted on the Barcamp web site.  Alternatively a central Barcamp site could be created where the organisors of a Barcamp could set up their event and then allow registered users of the site post sessions for that event. The benefit of having all the events registered on a single site is that participants would only need to register on a single site rather than for each Barcamp.

The organiser of the event would set up the start and finish dates/times for the event along with information on how long the sessions are to take and when breaks would be. The system would then calculate the wall based on this information.

The organisor would also be able to dictate at what times the session board would be available for participants to post sessions. This would stop people being able to post sessions ahead of time.

Organisors would have overall administration of the event session wall to be able to move a session on the board or to remove a session. Moving a session would result in a notification being sent to the person that created the session to let them know that the session has been moved and give them the ability to accept the change or move it to another session slot or to remove the session altogether.

Participants would register on the site. Participants would be asked to register before the event so that they don’t have to sign up on the day. The sign-up address would not be accessible from any menu or links on the site, the link would come in an email to the participent. The reasoning for not publishing the address is to avoid just anyone signing up for the site.

Once a participant is registered on the site they can then post sessions that they would like to host and to sign-up for any sessions that they are interested in.

Registered participants would be notified of any new sessions that are posted, moved or removed.

Registered participants would also be sent notifications a few minutes before a sessions that they have signed up for is about to start.

One of the things I have experienced at Barcamps is that there are often session times when there are multiple sessions that I would like to attend on at the same time. What the system would allow is for a participant to request a person hosting a session to see if they would be willing to move their sessions to a new time or if they would be willing to run a second session. The person hosting the session would be able to see the amount of interest in their session and either move or add a new session if the demand is there.

A participent is able to register their interest in a posted session. This will show the event organisers and the session host how much interest there is in the session. This information can be useful if the rooms that are available are quite small and there is a lot of interest, a change of session room may be in order.

Participants would also be encouraged to leave comments against a session to let others know what they thought of the session. The session host could also post links to any documents or information that was given in the presentation also.

There could also be a rating system so that participants could rate the session that they have attended. This could lead to an awards ceremoney at the end of the event for the most popular sessions.

Sessions would have tags associated with them which would allow participants to filter sessions that they may or may not be interested in.

The application need not be just web based but could also have mobile phone applications.

How about using the session wall application in a code retreat weekend as an example application to build?

As I have mentioned at the start, I know others have had the same idea of a session wall application and so this application may already be out there and available and may have a lot more functionality than I have mentioned in this post, however, do let me know what you think and if you have any other suggestions for this kind of application.

I look forward to hearing from you with your ideas and comments. Let’s see if we can make this happen.

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Barcamp Blackpool 3 – October 15th, 2011

Personal
on October 30th, 2011 by - No Comments

Once again it was time to hit the coast and Barcamp Blackpool. Barcamp Blackpool is one of my favorite Barcamps and number 3 did not disappoint.

The day started off early picking up @martinwass and @richardathome for the drive from Sheffield. This proved to be a good run with hardly any traffic and we arrived in plenty of time to find parking close to the venue at the Casino in the Pleasure beach and to grab a Canadian Steak sandwich for breakfast.

The venue is quite large and provides 3 rooms for talks as well as a break out area and booth seating around the edge of the main room. The seating around the main room did sometimes cause distraction as people were talking and disturbing some of the speakers. Unfortunately this is only to be expected when you have a “public” area in one of the session areas. All-in-all though this was not too much of an issue.

After the initial greeting talk from @ruby_gem, the session board filled up pretty much straight away.

With regards to the session board, I had heard rumour that there would be an on-line board being tested out but there was no mention of this.

I think an on-line board is a great idea. I would like to see attendees being able to post their talks on the on-line board and also for me to be able to say that I would like to attend a talk and receive an email reminder 5 minutes before a session to remind me where I need to be. It would also be good to be notified of new sessions being added or moved. Another idea would be to be able to request a duplicate session, especially on the two day barcamps as sometimes there are times when two good talks are on at the same time. Anyway, I digress.

There wasn’t one time where I didn’d have a session to attend. Most of the sessions I attended seemed to be around software for kids and the teaching of IT/ICT in schools. Since I have two young daughters and I know that computing isn”t taught anymore like it was when I was at school, with hands-on programming, then I was interested to hear what peoples views were on this and what could be done to bring computing back in to schools to give an idea of programming rather than just using Microsoft Office products.

The best session of the day for me was a presentation on Game Maket (yoyogames.com). This is a system for making games for kids and was presented by a secondary school child. It was shown how easy it was to make a game using this system and home captiviating it could be and how it could keep the interest of children. My eldest daughter (8yo) has asked many times about being able to make her own games, like the ones she plays on the CBBC site. The day after Barcamp I was able to give her my Acer Netbook and she sat and read through the tutorial and made her first game, which she and her sister loved playing. It was able to keep her interest for a few hours whilst she read the tutorial and went at a pace that she could see new things very quickly.

A downside to the venue was the WiFi which only seemed to work in the main Beach room. I look forward to this being resolved for the next event. I like to be able to perform searches and tweet, etc whilst in a session.

Freebies were available a plenty including the great T-shirts and Blackpool rock. Of course, the best freebie for me personally was the free ebook download from O’Reilly which has got me started on my Microsoft Certification trail.

Throughout the day we were treated to impromptu science lessons from the Physics Busker. These little sessions were a gem and very entertaining, my favourite being the home made rockets on the promenade. These were made from old camera film containers, an Alcaseltzer and a little water. Much fun.

It was a pity that we were not able to stay for the evening festivities, but plan on doing so for the next event.

@ruby_gem, @biglesp and the team made Barcamp Blackpool 3 an awsome day and I’m looking forward to think next one and many more.

 

© Richards Notes
CyberChimps