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As I settle down to ink my day at the “creme-de-la-unconference” of the year, I am looking for words that can contain my enthusiasm, tether the free spirit that runs amok at the BarCamps, and still capture the essence of what was a day replete with fun, sharing, networking, learning, and being involved with shaping the future of information technology (IT).
Sept 26th & 27th, Barcamp TampBay (BTB) at the USF, College of Business (COB), among other things, saw the “geek” and the “chic” coalesce. Yes, you read it right! There were attendees with belly T-shirts, colored hair, Louis Vuittons and I think they didn’t look one bit out of place, given that this was like a weekend getaway. Still thinking about colored hair? See here : http://l.pr/a44gq/
Day 1 was Developer’s Day and day 2 was Media May (which is less technical and I did not attend). Early Saturday Sept 26, I drove to Tampa, got lost a few times on Fowler Avenue, thanks to electronic navigation, but overall did not have too much trouble finding the Sun Dome parking lot next to USF COB. Welcome is always warm at Barcamps with a flurry of familiar faces going, “Whats happening Ritesh?”, “How’ve you been Mr. Chaube?”.
The schedule was divided into eight hour long slots across five rooms: Disys, Adobe, TADOW!!, Star TEC/PDEC and Real Mac. The first session on Beginning iPhone Development by Barry Ezell in Adobe room was pretty nice and even though I have played with iPhone development some, it was definitely educational to see things through the eyes of a “been-there-done-that” iPhone developer like Barry.
The next session by Derek Bender on Object oriented CSS in Tadow room showed us fascinating ways to use OO CSS to ease UI implementations and maintenance. If you are, in any way, related to UI development, browsing the presentation is advised.
Over a lunch of pizza and salad, I caught up with John Yang from JP Morgan and Navin from an upcoming startup. I must say that conversations at BarCamps are always thought provoking and informative. “MapReduce”, “hybrid platform” and “android” could be frequently heard in whispers among the glitter of iPhones and ubiquitous Macs that signal the growing penetration of mobile media into the social stratosphere.
I attended ‘iPhone devel secrets’ in the Disys room after lunch which had a panel of Jody@haneke, Charles@sparc, Barry@Bookmarkapp, among others. I liked the informal panel discussion style of the session and many controversial topics were handled including hurdles to approval in the App store, memory managements, pricing of apps and pitfalls of trying to recreate the web experience in the app.
Freelancers guide to awesomeness by James Tyron, Real Mac room, was definitely the finest session of the day, as he touched upon many issues that confront freelancers and contract development in general.
After chatting with Carolyn Borton from Sunshine Learning Systems, I jumped into her session on Practical MVC, in the Disys room. She presented the possibilities of Model-View-Controller with Loader framework in Flex and developed a working Flex app from scratch in the session. To see her troubleshoot the problems on the fly and get the app running with live feeds being pulled from Youtube using the Flex framework was pretty amazing.
My only regret for the day was missing the session ‘Nginx-from Russia with love’.
In closing, Team Atlantic feels privileged to sponsor unconferences like BarCamps where the future of IT and mobile platforms is being molded. Atlantic.Net is taking significant initiatives to position its network infrastructure, managed server and co-location offerings as a viable and preferred provider for hosting mobile backends and it was only fitting to find mobile internet tsunami as a sustaining theme at BarCamps taken one step further at Tampa Bay.
See you all at the next BarCamp!
I can be reached at rchaube -at- atlantic -dot- net or on twitter: @rchaube
Tags: BarCamp, Developers, Managed Servers, Mobile Applications, Ritesh Chaube, Tampa bay 2009
