Tell me I was going to a tech meetup a couple of years ago and I would have ran a mile. Tell me I was going to a tech meetup a year ago, I would have assumed you were talking about Meetdraw and still would have ran a mile.
But this weekend I found myself at Barcamp Bournemouth 5 - the fifth annual Bournemouth-based tech meetup weekend and talk-fest. It’s not just for those who have found themselves based around here, though. People from far flung places (or along the south coast) came along to make the 60 or so people who knocked back a few drinks, gave talks and hacked through the night.
The format of BarCamps are pretty simple - a bunch of nerds get together in a predefined space for a day or two and organise their own talks to put on during that time. Usually you would get a bunch of different talks spanning a wide range of tech stuff, and by the sounds of it this one wasn’t much different. Talks I went to ranged from defining a query structure to link the web up together, to learning the economics of start-ups.
I even did my own talk, on the stuff I learned during the development of my third year project in regards to Kinect usability, which you can see here.
There’s something I didn’t think I’d be doing - doing a talk on Kinect almost a year after I did any meaningful development with it. I’ve still been following it (and still intend on doing more stuff with it), but mostly I’ve been looking at usability with interfaces, which is a problem I don’t think anyone’s going to “solve” any time soon. But yeah, that’s all in the talk. Boring.
But it was that exploration I did when looking around things for the talk that spurred me back into action and doing some development in my spare time. Since starting work (through no fault of their own, I must add), doing some sort of web development stuff when I got home became bottom of my list of things to do. Now, after seeing some cool things at BarCamp, that stuff’s creeping back to me.
Andy made some pretty little graphics using Unity code, Brandon showed us how a little bit of Canvas magic can turn into a multiplayer maze game and Ian made it possible for me to control a tank through my web browser. An actual tank.
While these things are all pretty awesome, I probably learned the most practical knowledge from Dom’s talk on Agile. Was it technical? No, not really. But it outlined techniques you get put to good use in not just a tech environment. I’ve touched upon Agile before, but seeing how it’s supposed to be done properly highlights just where gaps are showing in the current processes I/we go through. Pair programming being the stand out element, though, for me. I just wish we had enough people to pull it off!
All in all, go to a BarCamp. Prepare a short talk on something you’re passionate about. I can guarantee you’ll get something out of the time you’re there, and you’ll find other people who will be just as interested in your thoughts. I came out of that weekend feeling like I educated a handful of people on Kinect development which otherwise would never have thought about it. That’s a win in my books.