the ‘bee log

This weekend I attended BarCampNYC2. Pretty fun time, I have to say. It was an interesting crowd given that it was a lot of open source types and that the conference was hosted at Microsoft’s mid-town office.

That said, here’s the summary from my side…

Day 1 - SocialJam! and .NET Guys

Most of the day I ended up spending with Don “donxml” Demsak, Miguel Castro, Scott Watermasysk, Chip Lemmon and some of their friends… all seasoned leaders in the .NET community. Totally cool guys, fun to hang out with, very welcoming, and helpful with tips toward blogging, speaking, and the whole community thing. A swell time, for sure.

One of the talks was an interactive session in which teams of five had to create a business plan in 10 or 15 minutes (here’s the Google video, our group comes in at ~30 minute mark). We were going to do it all with presence, geo-spatial, and mobile (ha). Maybe (!) more entertainment than business value. Anyway, it was think-on-your-feet-fun. Watching our opening pitch, I wonder if Miguel didn’t miss his true calling as a natural-born salesman. Clearly the guy is used to working a crowd.

Also broke off and listened to his (Miguel’s) new talk on using HttpHandlers to secure file downloads and got him to show me the URL rewriting functionality in ASP.NET, which was nice as (being in the smart client universe for so long) I’ve been lazy in keeping up w/ the stuff.

Day 2 - Rubyists & Cake

There was a group of self-described “Rubyists” at the conference. All young guys, very into the tool and the so-called “beauty” of language. They made a variety of ridiculous claims about the universality of Ruby that I didn’t really buy… such as “yeah you can use the QT toolkit for Ruby to develop desktop applications”. And just who is doing that?

All that aside, they certainly had admirable passion so I can’t dismiss them out of hand. I’ll only say that I got my first glimpse of what it is to feel like “the old programmer”. So I can surely appreciate their viewpoint and will make it an effort to dig a little deeper into the Ruby phenomenon — maybe even attend one of their NYC ruby user group meetings.

Got a demo on the CakePHP framework (a MVC framework for PHP). Looked very cool… so if you do LAMP stuff, it’s something to check out.

Miscellaneous

Almost everyone there had something interesting going on. Met a lot of really cool people, some folks from the East Village, a handful of provocateurs, etc. Peter from Microsoft did a really great job of playing host in a venue filled with Mac / FLOSS people that don’t necessarily have the warmest of warm feelings toward his company. Quite a diplomat.

It was worth the time, a lot of fun, and I’d probably do it again / next time…