So this weekend I travelled up to Blackpool to attend my 2nd Barcamp, Barcamp Blackpool and thought I owe it to the organisers to do a short review about the day (and the night!). Seeing as I’m starting a new job in Scotland with @richquick on Monday, we decided to meet up Thursday evening in Blackpool, take a day out doing the tourist stuff, then head to the pre-party on the Friday evening and attend the event on Saturday. We spent most of Friday at the Pleasure Beach, which was terrific fun and something I’d do again for sure. The pre-party started slowly, we met up with @houghster and @pauldunn_ first and headed to The Counting House, a bar which was the agreed meeting point, where we discovered @mheap on his own. We stayed there for a while and were joined by @lallyd, @BinaryKitten, @SonniesEdge and @Annamaflea. We stayed there until it closed at 1am, by which point we’d all had a bit too much, and me and Mike (@mheap) were singing along to Lady Gaga. We went to another bar, had a couple before myself, Rich and Paul decided we were hungry, so at about 2.30am we headed to the 24 hour McDonalds. Big Mac meals rule. At this point we decided to head back and grabbed a taxi, eventually crashing to sleep at around 4.
We headed to the venue at around 10.40am, in a place right by the Pleasure Beach. The event was well attended, with 125 people showing, a huge increase from the 30-40 that showed last year. I think this caught the organisers by surprise (understandably) and as such the proposed three rooms to do talks in just was not enough, so two more areas were quickly established, albeit without projectors. This was only a minor point and turned out to be a non-issue to be honest.
The slots were 45 minutes, which was kind of surprising, at BCL7 they were 20 and it had been fine, so I was a bit concerned, but in the end I think 45 minutes worked out fine, perhaps a tiny bit long, I think 35 would have been enough. The introduction “icebreaker” was done by “The Hodge” (@thehodge). It was essentially speed dating, it worked really well and I met a few people, but then it was stopped rather shortly. Another 10 minutes would have been a good idea I think.
After that it was onto the talks. I started with “Debugging with PHP using XDebug” by @bwaine. This was all about efficient debugging with PHP, and avoiding using var_dump. This was an excellent talk, Ben clearly knew his stuff and was very good at presenting, and I’ll be attempting to set XDebug up on my computer this week sometime.
Then I attended a talk by @timhastings about Twitter Reputation. It essentially showcased his site TagWalk.com, which is absolutely superb. Via various mathematical formulas and logic it can give you an entire load of information about a lot of stuff. For example, you can search for any hashtag and it will tell you about the people who use that tag, you can search for people and find out an entire host of information, and I’m only scratching the surface.
After that it was lunch. PIES! We all had a token and headed out to the Pie van. They were some of the best pies I’d tasted in a long time, absolutely stunning. I then had to quickly head back to the hotel because I’d forgotten my display adapter for my Macbook, but made it back in time for the sessions to start.
I attended @lallyd’s talk on British Sign Language and she taught us some introductory stuff, first the alphabet, then how to introduce yourself, what your job is, compliments and finally swear words. I think it says something about me that I only remember the swear words! I can spell my own name as well, but it was a super talk and really interesting.
Next up it was the Girl Geek Tea Party by a girl called Sam I think, I apologise now because I’m not entirely sure on your name and I’ve forgotten your twitter ID! So please correct me. This may have been a girl geek party but lots of guys went along to watch an introduction to HTML. I admit, if I had known it was that I would have gone elsewhere, as I’m pretty up to speed with HTML, but it was still good fun. It made my laugh to see the reaction to the line “The alt tag is not required” and I think the speaker felt slightly uncomfortable at that point but recovered well. At the end a few people who had never done HTML had made a page and were interested, so that’s fantastic.
After a short break I was off to Rich Quick’s discussion on why IT education is crap. As a student I can vouch for this, having attended a course a few months back that used tables for layout *vomit*. There was so much to discuss and some really key points, it was interesting. As a student I naturally lay the blame on the teachers but obviously it’s unfounded and to hear things from the other side was good.
I then went to a talk by a gentleman named Walter (again, sorry, but I can’t remember your twitter ID!) on Sociometry. To be honest, I spent most of it refining my talk which I was to do just after, so kind of zoomed in and out of listening, it was interesting though, it involved studying a group of people, in this example students, and asking them who they would take on holiday if they won 4 free tickets. From this teachers could see who was popular, who had a couple of friends and who had none/very little. This obviously helped the teachers identify who they needed to keep an eye on, etc.
Finally it was my turn. I went for “Pimp my jQuery” - a collection of quick tips and tricks which I’ve picked up in my 18 months or so of using jQuery. If you’re interested you can view it here: http://slidesha.re/doGLVk. I felt the talk was received well, lots of people seemed interested in it and a couple of people there had not used jQuery before, and said they would check it out, which is fantastic. I received some playful abuse by @mheap which I laughed off, especially at one point when he was about to point out something which I was about to say. Small victory to me! @BinaryKitten also commented some useful stuff, however if I’m honest I felt some things she said were a little disappointing, not really in the spirit of Barcamp.
PS - a couple of people watching me took pictures, if you could link me to these I’d be really grateful, and if you do have any questions about jQuery, then I’m @Jack_Franklin on Twitter and jack_franklin on Skype, so feel free to get in touch.
Finally we had a bar with £500 on (which went quickly!) and a magician. He was superb, very very funny and did some good stuff, I was laughing all the way through. We were kicked out at 1am, at which time I was pretty tipsy to say the least, Rich had downed an entire bottle of wine in one go and been up to his usual tricks. I’d had hilarious discussions with Tim Hastings et al as well. We wondered along the front for a bit but I wasn’t feeling great and called it a night at about 2am.
Overall it was superb and if it’s on next year I will be there for sure.
