How I Spent my Weekend: BarCamp Albuquerque

This was my first BarCamp. I always figured they were full of youthful geeks and I would have no place among them. But when Michael Bernstein started leaving comments on this blog and talking about it with me, I decided to give it a try.

It was one of my best decisions ever. I meet several interesting youthful geeks—okay, maybe youthful is a relative term, but that’s what they all looked like to me. But I’m happy to find them in Albuquerque, where I don’t often meet people like that. I don’t seem to find many ageful geeks anywhere I go, so I have to hope the youthful ones don’t boot me out the door when they see me coming.

I met Reid Givens, who gave a terrific presentation on marketing. He knows how to do a presentation and how to create good visuals. He’s never been to SXSWi, where I think he would be highly successful as a presenter. I hope he’ll make the effort to submit a proposal for a panel for SXSWi in 2010. Reid also did an extemporaneous presentation on CSS that was a lot of fun.

I met Emily Lewis, who presented a Web Standards Primer. She started a blog about standards and semantics about a month ago. She posted a link to her presentation in this blog post A Great Time at BarCamp Albuquerque. In a state where many people don’t know what web standards or web accessibility even are, Emily is a jewel.

There were some geeky presentations, too. It was BarCamp, after all. The ones that I could follow the best with my limited understanding of programming were Chris Kenworthy who talked about web analytics and gave some good demonstrations of several of the tools he uses for that.

Jack Moffit talked about XMPP. This discussion also made some inroads into my brain. Some of the things you can do with XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), an open XML communications technology, are very interesting and it appears to be a hot trend in the making.

Daniel Lyons talked about REST. Michael Berstein talked about Python. I only heard bits and pieces of some of the other things. One thing I really hated to miss (but had to miss) was the presentation by ten-year-old Adam Thomas who talked about Scratch programming for kids. I secretly watched him playing with Scratch while the adults yammered on during the day and he created some very impressive things  while he was goofing around waiting his turn.

I used Twitter to microblog links and things I wanted to remember, so there are a few things mentioned on Twitter that I didn’t include in this more lengthy post.

BarCamp Albuquerque, I’m glad I metcha!

e mergent took photos.

3 thoughts on “How I Spent my Weekend: BarCamp Albuquerque”

  1. I am so glad you could make it. It means a lot to me that you enjoyed my presentation, I am always afraid, especially at BarCamp that I will miss the “market” as it were. But then again, thats kind of what BarCamp is all about. Hope to see you around at the other web community functions.

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