HN Explorer

Ask YC: Been going to BarCamps? (BarCampBoston3 is May 17th & 18th!)

18 points by JayNeely ↗ HN
Is the Hacker News community aware of the free unconference phenomena, like BarCamp/PodCamp/MacCamp, etc.? They're community-organized conferences for hackers, geeks, techies, webheads, and entrepreneurs.

There's a huge list of BarCamps at: http://barcamp.org/

For those of you in the Boston area, I hope you'll come to BarCampBoston3 May 17th & 18th, and give a talk or otherwise participate: http://www.barcampboston.org/

Topics may include, but are not limited to: open source software, startups, UI design, entrepreneurship, AJAX, hardware hacking, robotics,mobile computing, bioinformatics, RSS, Social Software, programming languages, and the future of technology.

20 comments

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shimon
BarCamps are great for (1) meeting local people, (2) vetting ideas, (3) scoping out new technology. Not unlike Hacker News. :)
martythemaniak
I've been going to the local ones (DemoCamp, StartupCamp, FacebookCamp) for the last little while and they're definitely worth it. You learn a few interesting things, see a cool demo or two, meet some people etc.

Depending on when the next democamptoronto is and how much work I put into my project, I was hoping to demo it and launch it then. Realistically, it'd probably have to be the other afterwards though.

thingsilearned
Yup. They're awesome. Minnebar (Minnesota) may 10th.

http://barcamp.org/MinneBar

damon
I'll be @ minnebar May 10th also. I've heard estimates of 400 attendees planned! If you're interested in iPhone development, lets meet up. I'm doing a 5-min lightning round talk on native iPhone objc development.
jon_dahl
Agreed. In the Twin Cities, Minnebar is by far the best tech/startup event of the year. We've met clients, business partners, and even our attorneys there.
pk
I went to last year's Boston BarCamp and it was a great event overall. Some workshops were a little "eh", but others were really good. I'm thinking about doing a session on "Graphic Design for Coders" - anybody here have any thoughts on whether that would be a good topic?

A neat thing I saw at last year's BarCamp was an early demo of Dropbox by Drew Huston who went on to be part of YC Summer '07. I think Reddit demoed at the Boston BarCamp the year before that too, before they went into YC Summer '06.

JayNeely
I remember seeing the Dropbox demo, and I've loved seeing it getting covered in the news ever since. Always nifty to see something in its early stages before it starts to go big.

Graphic Design for Coders could be cool, but I'm not sure what you mean by it. Graphic Design for non-graphic-designers, whom coders are one example of? (That I would love.) Or graphic design via code, like CSS and AJAX? (Which I could also dig.)

pk
Both :-) -- graphic design for non-graphic designers who know HTML and CSS, but aren't quite sure what to do with it.

Here's a blurb I wrote up for the Sessions wiki page (http://2008.barcampboston.org/index.php?title=Sessions):

Do you have your web app backend coding skills down pat, but don't know where to start to give your front end that nice clean look? It's not as hard as you might think. We're no experts, but we'd love to help get people started by sharing what we've learned from going through the process of designing a site as coders.

ericb
I would kill for a graphic design for coders workshop. If you do a workshop, I promise not to kill you. It would be someone else of your choosing. ;-)
ericb
Any thoughts on whether this would be saturday or sunday if you do do it? I'm moving that saturday, sadly.
pk
It would definitely be on Sunday - I'm going to a friend's graduation at Worcester Polytechnic Institute that Saturday.
rubymaverick
BarCamp is great. I have been to both BarCampOrlando's. While some of the talks where a little on the basic/general/boring side (I'm looking at you Agile proponents), there were also some that were great and totally outside my normal realm of what I am interested in.
igexome
I helped throw BarCampRochester3 - largest one in upstate NY! RITers represent! Gathering quality people who want to give something of interest to each other truly does cull the best and the brightest in an area.
a-priori
So far, only one: a DemoCampGuelph back in January. I'm planning on going to more similar events in Guelph, Waterloo and maybe Toronto this summer.
jamesbritt
There have been two in Phoenix, AZ; I organized the last one.

They are great, and will likely look to roll another one at the end of this year, but I was a little frustrated in getting more people to stand up and show off.

Perhaps Phoenix is just not happening enough place for this, or I need to get some marketing smarts.

hendler
I was in the last Bar Camp Miami, great time.

If you go with an open mind and less of a mission, it's great. The camps attract curious, ambitious, and savvy folk - not just for Bar Hoppers!

I'm moving back to Boston just in time for this one! Thanks for posting!

babul
I tried to go to barcamp3 and 4 in London but never get registered in time. tickets get booked within 5mins of going live and they advertise going live time of 11am but systems opened at ~10am and sometimes even earlier/later.

This upset a lot of people in London wanting to go.