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 
)
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.
