Nottingham’s first BarCamp was held over the weekend in the awesome NottsHack space. Like many smaller regional BarCamps, I enjoyed it for its friendly atmosphere and relaxed feeling. The sessions were quite varied, with quite a few non-technical ones on the board. Talks I attended on Saturday included:
- Are We Asking Too Much – a discussion lead by Micheal Heap (@mheap) about the difficulties he’s had hiring someone for front-end developer role.
- Less: Spruce Up Your CSS – session by Michael Mokrysz (@46bit) – interesting because I have recently used LESS whilst freelancing with a company in London.
- Turning Data Into People – a genealogical talk by Alex Wolf (@101ofawolf). My dad did a lot of genealogy in the 1980’s and always had his head buried in the census returns. But Alex pointed out that these just give you the bare facts about someone. She has researched one branch of her family from the Victorian era who were a bunch of scoundrels – information which has been gleaned from local papers of the period. It certainly helps to give some characterisation to our ancestors – but beware as you may not like what comes out of your closet!
- How To Build Your Own Museum – a session where @katemonkey talked about using Tumblr to curate your own online museum of long-tail or niche interests.
- Pomodoro – Gemma (@ruby_gem) explained her albeit brief experiences of using the Pomodoro productivity technique for the first time recently.
- The Scooby Van And Other Fun – in which @alistair finally divulged what he’s been doing playing with DAB and GPS at Nottingham University.
Shifty dude who looks nothing like Alistair
Sunday was rather more practical in terms of which sessions I went to:
- Soldering 101 – making a flashing @HSNotts badge. Well although I’ve done a lot of soldering in the past, someone had to keep an eye on Not Alistair when he fired up his iron 😉
- Origami Maths – in which Dan Hagon (@axiomsofchoice) got us to make components for a dodecahedron out of 20 sheets of A4 paper.
- Photowalk – after lunch, Alistair, Martin and I went for a quick photowalk and geocaching session to the nearby City Farm. Alistair met a dalek, I held an owl and Martin “vandalised” a sign!
- Balloon Bending – Dan held another session on making balloon animals, which was great fun.
My Session
I ran a session about my recent adventures into the world of High Speed Flash photography, which was well attended. You can view my slides from Slideshare here – although they make more sense if you’re listening to my chatter as well 🙂
Photos From The Weekend
Here is a selection of the best pictures I took – as you can see, much fun was had by all:
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157627277829122″]
