I have been reading tons of blogs talking about BarCampLondon. I don't know what else to say about BarCampLondon which hasn't been said. So I'll do my best to comment back on everyones blogs and round up the best parts in this blog post. So onwards and upwards…
So first up, Sarah Blow from the Girl geekdinners, decided to have an exclusive girl geekdinner in the middle of BarCampLondon. It was great stuff and I think we had a really good conversation about women and technology. Sarah with her brand new Toshiba Tablet PC (2 generations ahead of mine) recorded the whole session and we would have carried on if not for the Pizza delivery (thanks Yahoo for that). I didn't attend the mystery session but thats also up and online. Good work Sarah, I look forward to listening to both of them.
Simon Wilson introduced everyone to Werewolf while the Mashpit started in the main room. Mashpit started off with a range of topics but slowly filtered down to a very small amount of people. Rob, Sheila, Tom and myself were around one switch talking interchangable about XSL, Ruby on Rails, pipelines, etc. I think while me and Rob argued about frameworks, Sheila and Tom had settled into a session on learning XSL. Now Tom's well into XSL.
Sheila also taught me how to use XSLT. It's so unbelievably cool!
Me and Ben had not planned to be attending many of the sessions because we thought we'd be too busy cleaning up and directing people to the right place (or something). This was certainly not true, specially on Sunday. But to be honest, it was all to do with the helpers we had. People just helped out and for example at 4:45pm on Sunday the place was pretty much cleaned in 15mins flat. Yep 5 meeting rooms and a reception just needed a hover and a polish here and there. It was truely awesome and ended the conference perfectly. Unfortually I made the mistake of recommending a pub which was actually closed down, so people did carry on but it was over for me. It was a shame because I should have phoned Sarah Blow or someone. Damm it! *smile* Don't worry guys I'll make up for it all at d.construct this Friday.
Nicole and others make a really good point about the lack of post-conference support. I hoped that the wiki would be used more but we're still having the lock problem with PB wiki so now people are using Ben's Wiki. Ideally we would have something like the Backnetwork, but you have to remember its a unconference so nothing can be planned beforehand. However it would have been great to have all the presentations online so I could revisit the ones I missed.
Don't worry folks there's lots more to come…. once I finish writing up the rest.
