This blog has been silent for a couple months, but the news I have to share is well worth breaking that peaceful quiet :) I’ve been living in Tacoma Washington since I graduated college, and I am really loving the area. Surrounded by water, two mountain ranges in sight, green all year… it really is beautiful. The only downside of the area, while having more than a few technical companies, lacks a “tech scene.” This is thankfully starting to change with the introduction of Tacoma’s first Tech Meetup earlier this month (thanks to Erik Emery for setting that up!), and strengthened by a collaborative effort between Scott Kuehn, Michael Maitlin, and myself. That effort being…
The First Annual Barcamp Tacoma!
Barcamp is labeled as an “un-conference,” where people come together and talk about whatever it is they feel like discussing. Or, from the Barcamp.org website:
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event.
We’ve had some help getting a space to hold the event from Suite 133, a local collaborative workspace, and with that locked down we also have a date: August 8th, 2009. The event is free (food and drinks included!), and if we have enough sponsors we’ll be trying to lock down t-shirts for everyone as well.
On behalf of myself and the other hosts, we really hope you are all able to come help us make Tacoma’s first barcamp a success. Check out the site for all the details, and be sure to sign up so we know how much food to pack. If you don’t know what you would talk about, we’ve created a page with presentation topics we would love to hear about. Share what you know, even if you don’t consider yourself an expert. All we care about is sharing information, everything else is just icing :)
Hope to see you all there!
Barcamp Rochester 3 was Saturday, and it turned out to be an *amazing* event. The idea behind Barcamp is that it is an informal conference where there are no spectators, only participants. This means that everyone who attends gives a talk on something, ranging from programming languages to intellectual property to enacting political change through technology.
The talks ran from 10:00am to 10:00pm in three separate rooms, and given that multiple talks were going on at the same time it was impossible to see everything. I did attend Google employee Jordan Sissel’s “cool stuff I’ve worked on” presentation, jquery creator John Resig’s jquery presentation, frequency ninja Andrew Potter’s wireless and spectrum lecture, and a round-table discussion on politics. Needless to say, it was a very full day.
I personally gave an hour lecture on the same material as my most recent Society of Lectors lecture, covering hacking through exploitation and shellcode. The turnout for my talk was great, and for anyone who attended that is now reading this, thanks for being part of such a great audience! I really enjoy giving this lecture – I get excited about the topic, and it is great to see other people getting excited about it too. The questions at the end are always my favorite part, and given more time, I could have talked forever about some of the topics that were brought up because of them.
The biggest event of the day for me was a talk on how we can use technology to inform people, with a special focus on the US political system. It started as a round table discussion led by Remy D of the NYPIRG and James Turk of the Sunlight Foundation labs, with Dave, Heewa, and myself attending. It moved from ideas to implementable actions, and while I entered the discussion skeptic, I left with the feeling that it is possible for individuals to make a difference in a system that is much larger than themselves. I hope to engage in future work that will spread the same kind of hope to other individuals, because the opportunity exists to shake the popular apathy for our communities – and knowing it is somehow comforting.
On top of everything else, I’m helping Dave and Heewa with the One Laptop Per Child program at RIT. The organization is sound, and their ideas are worth pushing forward. I’m particularly interested in the mesh networking capabilities of the XO laptop, and my contributions will most likely be related to software that takes advantage of it. The reason I’m bringing this up in a post on Barcamp is because Dave and Heewa gave a couple talks on the initiative and their plans for it at RIT, and having finally obtained an XO laptop, I got to play with it! John Resig also had one, so we messed around with chat and video feeds. It was pretty cool, even though the size of the XO makes it kind of difficult to work with.
The event overall is just something you have to experience. There is nothing quite like a gathering of a bunch of smart people talking about what interests them. With few exceptions, everyone is really friendly and down to earth, which makes it really easy to just focus on the goal of the day: to share ideas, meet new people, and leave just a bit better than you were when you came.
Here’s looking forward to Barcamp Rochester 4!
