As I arrived, the ‘Flame Wars‘ session was drawing to a close. A panel of four volunteers from the event debating sensible stuff, with a sprinkling of debating ridiculous stuff. The most fitting analogy I can come up with is a cross between QI, Points of View and Argumental, for tech geeks.

Following the Flame Wars session, Mike Croucher from walkingrandomly presented a talk on free maths software. You wouldn’t have thought that a talk about maths would attract a crowd – or maybe you would at a barcamp – but it did seem to have a certain stickiness (the second time that subject has come up this weekend, which is a little disturbing) in that passers-by would stop and admire the colourful 3-D graphs and maths symbols flying around the screen.

Another quiz over lunch – busy getting Saturday’s post sorted so didn’t enter that one. That’s my excuse anyway. The second quiz was maybe a little less web & tech oriented…

My BarCamp experience wrapped up with a session I’d asked for on the forum under the title “What’s so good about functional programming?“. I’m a Java guy, so I’m interested in how the functional paradigm differs from OO and what the benefits or drawbacks are for each. One of the chaps ran an hour-long session introducing the functional programming language Haskell, and using it to solve some mathematical problems posed on the Project Euler site. He demonstrated how approaching problems functionally can be a difficult vector, but can also result in a software solution that is much more readable, more efficient in terms of processing and storage resources and can be proven to result in the correct answer by definition. The format of the session was a little different to the other talks in that it was a very interactive, Q&A type thing. Although an hour was nowhere near long enough to really get into the subject properly, it covered enough stuff to be intriguing – I’ll be playing if I ever find any spare time!

So, all in, I had a fantastic weekend. I learnt some stuff, saw some good examples of how to give talks, widened my interests, met a load of new people, and caught up with some folks I haven’t seen for a while. For me, it was the Twitter and Netbook BarCamp – I even met up with some folks I follow on Twitter because they tweeted that they were there!

A quick, and huge, word of thanks to the organizers and the sponsors. Setting up an event like that with all those people must be a nightmare, and the sponsors must have chipped in a bucketload of cash to make it happen. I don’t know as I’ve not been to a barcamp event before, but I’m told that it was a great example, so nice one to all those involved. There are too many sponsors to name, but there’s loads of details on the barcampsheff site.

Here’s my top tips for any other potential BarCamp virgins out there.

Have an open mind. Try and get to as much stuff as you can – you might miss something cool otherwise.
Always keep your stuff in sight. If the event is held in an venue that’s open to the public, you never know. We did have one unfortunate occurrence of some stuff going missing and it’s got to ruin your day.
Try stuff. If you get the chance to have a go, do it!
It’s probably not a stupid question. So ask it anyway.
Talk. Everyone was really friendly.
Soak it up. One word – atmosphere.
Do a talk! Go in with something you care about in mind and do a talk about it – wish I had.
Take your kit. Are you going to need power adapters and accessories? There might be stuff there but then again there might not.

Right, now I’m off to buy flowers and chocolates to say sorry to my other half for disappearing for most of the weekend!

Pippa’s writeup of her Jedi Mind Tricks (Influencing people) talk
Marc Johnson’s barcampsheff blog post
Caz Mockett’s barcampsheff blog post
The BarCamp Sheffield 2008 Photos
The BarCamp Sheffield 2008 Site
The BarCamp Sheffield 2008 Forum

One of the things I didn’t know about was how to find out what talks and events were on when – there’s as idea of the content of some of the talks on the forum. Turns out that the organizers put up a big grid of days, times and rooms, with a load of paper slips for folks to post up stuff they wanted to talk about. What a great idea, the schedule for talks just sort of appeared over the course of the Friday night and the Saturday.

So – what kind of stuff do people talk about at this thing? I’m going to just give my brief summary of the talks I attended, but there were up to four talks going on at once so I had to pick and choose. I think there’s really something of interest for anyone interested in anything to do with technology here.

How spammers are breaking email. Looking at how spammers abuse the naivity of the e-mail protocol (SMTP) to send you viagra advertising, and some of the countermeasures that can be used to protect email users from their spam.

I’ll show you mine – git and github. Placing your source code into a repository where other people can view, comment and contribute to it – github is a free service that does just that. The guys giving the talk also talked about the softer considerations when sharing your source code – what if everyone thinks your code is dumb? Only thought about it afterwards, but refactormycode.com is along the same collaborative development theme.

I also got a groovy t-shirt for contributing my laptop because there was no adapter for the guy’s Mac DV-out.

Arduino. A short talk on working with the Arduino hardware, including a couple or demonstrations of things people have done. The whole hardware hacking thing is really interesting – I just wish I had the time time to have a go myself!

The we have the lunchtime quiz. Name that Web2.0 service by the logo, who made such-and-such a quote, etc. My team came 2nd to last. I don’t feel too bad about it – I like to think I count as a geek, but I can only aspire the level of uber-geekdom that is on display here!

After lunch, I kicked off by attending a talk entitled Sneaking AGILE in under the Radar. I’m interested in the whole agile thing these days, as it seems to be the way I naturally try to work. The talk was about how to adopt useful elements of the agile style without making a big fuss.

Agile Estimating: Planning poker. Anyone who has ever tried to estimate how long a new feature, or enhancement, or bug fix for something is going to take will probably be familiar with how tricky it is to do. The quote from the talk is that doing the work often takes five times longer than the original estimate indicated. This talk was about approaches to estimating process – maybe sounds dull until you take into account the poker element…

My First Rails Plugin. One of the guys who’s justing starting out with Ruby On Rails has build a plugin to try and make typing content into a web form more transparent to the average user. An interesting talk, because it was less a presenter-presenting thing as a guy looking to run his ideas past some tech folks and get feedback.

Which led nicely onto dinner – again, great food laid on by the venue.

I do know that there was Poker going on around now – but I was too busy doing other stuff to join in. Shame that, I was looking forward to playing a few hands.

Whilst dinner was serving up, some of the rooms started showing films – geek-oriented, ideal dinnertime viewing! The first film was The Code Linux, a history of the development of Linux and the people involved in the early days.

Next up was a bit of a gem, to be honest – TED talks. Online video coverage of talks given in a very expensive US conference – the four I watched were absolute gold. Check out Johnny Lee talking about Wii remote hacks – you’re going to want to have a go yourself. For something a little deeper and more thought-provoking, I recommend Ken Robinson’s talk on education. It’s one of the best talks I’ve ever seen, and I think I’m going to have to watch it again a couple of times to really take it in. Apparently, these talks are released each week, so this one’s going straight on my iPod.

My evening wrapped up when I caught up with some of my old Taekwondo buddies, and a Wado-Ryu Karate guy. I gave the Hoegaarden a miss though today, and I think I’ll feel much better in the morning for it.

The BarCamp Sheffield 2008 Photos
The BarCamp Sheffield 2008 Site
The BarCamp Sheffield 2008 Forum

I know a couple of the guys organising the event, so I turned up a little early to see if I could lend a hand. After being employed pulling the balls off springy plastic headband things (my collaborator in the wanton destruction thinks that they’re going to used in some kind of human tag cloud… what could possibly go wrong?) I acquired my very own pair of round-ended scissors and put my pre-school-taught l33t skillz in cutting stuff up to good use preparing what could be the most vital ingredient of the event – the beer tokens.

Once my work was done, I pulled out my laptop, hooked up the wireless network here and started on this post. As an aside, I have to take my hat off to the Ubuntu guys – the ease of use of the connectivity aspects of 8.10 is fantastic – it’s just seamless. Maybe that’s not such a great thing – is the feeling of victorious elation I used to feel after those running battles with sound cards, XFree86 and networking a thing of the past? No, I’ve decided – it is a great thing after all.

If I’d thought ahead, I’d probably have bought a camera – I only have my phone on me and the camera on that is absolutely rubbish.

The sponsorship behind the event is pretty impressive. Tickets are free, (some) beer is free, dinner is free (and there’ll be free breakfast tomorrow too) and the talks are free. Thanks a lot to the sponsors!

There’s not much going on in the way of formal events going on tonight – it’s more a meet and greet while things get set up – good for me because there’s plenty of familiar faces from geekups I want to catch up with! The one scheduled session is called ‘Whose Slide is it Anyway?’, where the organizers find slideshows on t’internet and folks present them. Pretty good icebreaker.

As 1am draws near, I’ve heard presentations on Mario Kart, Abu Dhabi and worryingly Stickiness, my usual love-hate relationship with Hoegaarden is well underway and most people still left awake are sporting springy headband things which, as it turns out, are for you to advertise your interests to the rest of the group.

Time to call a taxi, as at 10am-ish tomorrow morning the talks and presentations start…

The BarCamp Sheffield 2008 Photos
The BarCamp Sheffield 2008 Site
The BarCamp Sheffield 2008 Forum