Barcamp Brighton 4

09/09/2009

So, this weekend saw Brighton's fourth BarCamp, at the Old Library in the centre of town. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, BarCamp is a special type of conference where there is no published schedule: instead, each participant must themself fill a half-hour slot with a talk, demo, discussion or some other event, and so the attendees themselves become the speakers.

I love all this ad-hocery, and have managed to turn up at all the Brighton BarCamps so far. I've talked about QR codes, AVR microchips and Scratch to date and this yearI gave an introduction to programming applications for phones that run the Android operating system. You can see my slides on Slideshare.

The whole event was hugely enjoyable: the venue itself - best described as a derelict building - had been taken over by artists, and so the whole space was covered with amazing large-scale paintings and sculptures, as you can see from the video below or these 3D Photosynths.

There were loads of talks over the weekend, and often two interesting things clashed so there isn't space to cover them all. However, some of the highlights for me were:

Robbie Clutton on cross-platform mobile development with HTML, Javascript and PhoneGap
Dom Mitchell on source control with Git
Christian Heilmann on using W3C Widgets on your mobile
Simon Willison on the history of the zeppelin
Helen Moore on Web Typography
Jamie Matthews on Minimalism in Web Development
Rosario Rascuna on using Mechanical Turk to provide the Wisdom of Crowds

There were also several talks I missed but would have loved to see: Seb Lee-Delisle on 3D effects with HTML canvas and Jez Nicholson's Agile Development workshop spring to mind. Thanks to everyone I chatted to as well between sessions, especially Dan Wentworth for telling me how to tether my Android phone (hint: Proxoid). I'd also like to point out that I remain unrepentant about my idea to convert the world to play scissors-paper-stone-spock-lizard instead of its better-known counterpart. If we all try hard, we can do it within a generation!