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I had a fantastic time at BarCampSheffield2, my first northern BarCamp.

It was great to return to Sheffield (where I did my electronic engineering degree) after an absence of more than 13 years. Far too long!

[Showroom Cafe/Bar/Cinema, the venue]

The venue was in a rather nice Art Deco cinema/cafe/conference centre called the Showroom, in the heart of the city. It worked well as a place to host the BarCamp, with most of the rooms we used very close to each other. And the food was excellent – right from Dinner on the Friday night through to lunch on Sunday.

The warmup party on Friday night was a lot of fun. We were encouraged to make thought bubbles with our tags/interests and contact details, as a bit of an ice breaker. I think we felt a little daft at first, but with the aid of a few beers, we generally got into the swing of things!

[Three loonies wearing thought bubbles: Jay, me, Alistair]

I really enjoyed some of the presentations and discussions which were run during the event. I got mine over with early on, A Newbies’ Guide to Geocaching, which you can download from Slideshare.

Next up was a discussion about Community, and what it meant to us, lead by Alistair MacDonald. Some interesting points were raised, and this also lead nicely into another discussion a couple of sessions later on Social Isolation, lead by Kian Ryan.

After lunch, I noticed the sun was out, so I skived out for half an hour to photograph some nearby sights with a bit of decent light. The sculpture Cutting Edge made it as picture of the day, but I also liked this [right] one of a little lad admiring the cascade fountain near the station:

Alistair & I also managed a geocaching session in the city centre, before it got too cold and dark! Then it was back to the venue to thaw out and watch a session on Self-Defence for Geeks run by Paul Stanton.

Before long it was time for dinner and moar beer and silliness. You can imagine what the evening ended up like. And you can imagine what state some folks were in the next morning. Thankfully, the reving properties of copious quantities of tea and bacon soon did the trick.

Some Sunday sessions which I enjoyed included Jay Cousins‘ talk on Language and how it can influence our perception of technology. He made up some pretty neat words too!

Emma Persky ran a discussion about the imbalance of women in positions of influence within the web, when there is more or less parity now with the ratio of male/females who use the web. Not sure that any concensus was reached, as we seemed to talk in circles for a bit!

Tom Scott ran an excellent quiz during the Sunday lunch slot – the team I was on won, so of course it was excellent! We also had an open discussion with the organisers about the way things had gone over the two days, chaired by Jag Gill. Certainly they did some things differently; some worked well, others not quite so well, but overall I think the team did an excellent job at organising their very first BarCamp! Bravo to Jag, Ibbo, Josie, Jay and all the others.

Jon Linklater-Johnson ran a session on 10 Top Tips To Stop You From Messing Up Your Website. There was also a session about Tea, which was quite appropriate since lots of geeks seem to be obsessed with the stuff. Later on, there was a special showing of Dr Horrible, something I’d heard much-Tweeted about. Quite funny in places, purely bonkers in others!

The after party saw a few hardy souls do more damage to their livers, play Semantopoly, do silly things with Alistair’s BathCamp duck, and then go out for a massive curry. Great way to wind up the event.

[Jay and his Pirate Duck]

But I really think the last word should go to Ruby & Perl, Gemma’s ferrets who made a guest appearance on Saturday. Now I’ve experienced a BarCamp with ferrets, things will never be the same again!

[Ferrets ahoy!]

So that’s it really. A great weekend of geeking out. Thanks to all the folks who organised, contributed and turned up. It was a pleasure to meet you all. You can see the rest of my photos from the weekend on Flickr.

Tom Scott on Open Source Incremental Backups For Windows
Tom’s presentation was useful for those who want to manage incremental backups for Windows in a sensible way. His full presentation is available here: http://www.thomasscott.net/barcamp2/

I backup my system less often than I probably should (photographs aside, which get saved in at least 3 places regularly – I’m paranoid!). So perhaps I should take the time to have a go at this myself.

Meri Williams on Project Management For Busy Geeks
Meri’s talk started with the Basic lifecycle of a project. Few projects go through the whole lifecycle properly. The Big Secret is that, for smaller projects, PM is all about Initiating, Planning & Closing (and not worrying too much about execution and control). Planning should NOT be about planning a step by step guide – but something that helps you understand what you’re doing. And communicating this to stakeholders. She also mentioned that lots of projects are not closed properly – haven’t we all been plagued by customers that just won’t go away but pester by saying “can you just do this bit extra?”.

[Meri's running order]

Leisa Reichelt on Design Consequences
Leisa’s was a hands-on session where she demonstrated her techniques for initial brainstorming of site layouts and designs. We all had to break out the pen and paper (and post-its!), and “mock up” a screen to show the BarCamp Schedule (the real thing was done the low-tech way as you can see):

[Day 1 Schedule - done the low-tech way - but it works very well]

Then we talked about what we’d done and why. It was nice to get away from the computers for a bit, and everyone had fun explaining how they had implemented their solution to their neighbour.

[Andy and Nat listen intently to one BarCamper's version of the schedule solution]

Robert Lee-Cann on Over-Engineering Is Fun!
Leeky’s presentation was a light-hearted and thoroughly enjoyable look at solutions to problems which have been hugely over-engineered, and he wondered if this was a typical trait of geeks in general?

[right, Leeky having a geeky- brained moment]

Problem: Is the coffee machine full?
Easy Solution: get off your butt and go and look
Geek Solution: we all know where a bit of over-thinking can get us: webcam trained on the coffee maker

[below: The man needs coffee!]

Problem: Who’s going to make the tea round?
Easy Solution: Press-gang someone into doing it
Geek Solution: Web-based ordering of drinks, LED display in the kitchen showing the round required, online voting afterwards to see how well it was made!

Confessions:
Having described the above solution which is in use at his work (!), he asked us all if we would like to confess our most ludicrous over-engineered solutions. Some of the best were as follows:

• Meri – private IRC channel to decide the flavour of your pizza before ordering it – used by people living in the same house
• John – set up a telly, Freeview box and video transmitter in one room and a reciever in the other room – when they could have run a cable through the wall!
• Brave Geek: had written 112K JavaScript file to write a whole web page on the fly, built in the days of Netscape 3 and IE3! He got a round of applause for that one!

Pitch An Idea
The final part was for the audience to come up with a solution to the perennial problem of putting the loo seat up or down in the bathroom. Many outrageous examples were put forward, which ranged from having a finger-print recognition pad on the loo door, so the loo “knew” who was about to sit down, to weight/position sensitive pads just in front of the loo, so it knew if gents were standing or sitting down! All great fun.

Andy Budd on The User Experience
Andy started by talking about the early desktop interface, when abstracting the interface made it easier for “non-tech” users. At the time, it was revolutionary. Similarly, Joe Bloggs doesn’t want to learn Unix to use their iPods. People DON’T read the manual. No wonder we say RTFM so often.

We learn by experience – programming DVD recorder is very similar to programming the video. So the building blocks are there and users learn the metaphores. It makes it important not to break common interaction habits.

Users learn new technology by exploring – you switch it on and start clicking buttons to see what happens! So make buttons look like buttons. And make sure it’s not fragile so that inexperienced users can’t break the system with one click.

Modern life constantly demands our attention. How easy is it to send a text while crossing the road? Rarely do people give your application 100% of their attention. Design it to make things easy, as people are adept at multitasking.

Make error reports blindingly obvious. I
t’s a great place to make the user experience a good one – as soon as something breaks, you want immediate service or fix, or at very least, a human-readable error message. Don’t make users feel stupid when they do something wrong.

[I'm no dunce]

Usability is all about making technology easier to use. Plan user experiences carefully. Create wireframe storyboards – think how filming is never done without paper mockups. Then test it on REAL users. Can be as simple as chatting to coffee shop customers – feed them donuts and buy them a coffee and get their feedback on your site – one day user testing, low budget – anything is better than nothing.

UCD is sometimes confused with Business Centred Design or Marketing Centred Design. You should not have to deal with politics. But we all know how hard that can be. Designing with a focus on business unit function is also horribly bad. Technology Centred Design – designing around our own technical ability – we do it that way because we can – is also a no-no.

Get out and talk to the users – find out what they’re trying to do with your site. Users don’t just want to know what the weather is going to do for the sake of interest, they are more likely to need to know if whether to take an umbrella with them today!

Build up Personas for each broad type of user. Design with these in mind. Very easy isn’t always best – maintain a balance. Sites or games companies know about flow – you lose time when you are interested in something.

Starbucks are masters of the “coffee experience” – which is why we are willing to shell out 3 quid for a cup coffee!

Lastly, he made the point that the iPod would probably fail user testing. People buy into the brand. You might struggle through learning the interface, but you’re willing to learn it because your friends tell you it’s a cool gagdet. So for the right brand, people are willing to take the time to learn new ways of working.