What a weekend — BCB4 has just been and gone. This was my first BarCamp, and it was a superb experience. Great talks; great people; great venue. Somewhat predictably I gave a talk on git. But I misjudged the audience and had a bad case of nerves.
Although I enjoyed pretty much everything I listened to, the one thing that keeps coming back to me is Seb’s Simple 3d in HTML5 Canvas talk. It reminded me that actually, the maths isn’t that hard, and the environment is really easy to work in. And the results are spectacular, even with simple code. I’ve been playing with canvas since in my down time since then.
I also learned about robots (need patience yet very cool); project lombok (sufficently encapsulated magic); bulletproof widgets (with scary CSS); aikido & software development (practice, practice, practice); how car engines work (controlled boom); systems engineering (know your context). But it all pales compared to just meeting people, finding out what they’ve been up to and generally bouncing ideas around.
Check out bcb4 on flickr to get a feel.
Of course none of this could have happened without super-human powers of organisation. Whilst there were others involved, Jay is a hero for pulling it all together (well, and Minna). Thanks, Jay! See you at BCB5!
Update: since at least one person asked for it, here are the slides for my git presentation.
Jabbering Giraffe 