Conveniently located a five minute walk from my house, BarCampBoston 3 was my first East Coast unconference. In fact it was my first East Coast tech conference since I was a volunteer at the fourth web conference in 1995. (I mean it — the fourth).
Like Foo Camp, the organizers put up a physical calendar with room names and people fill in the slots with whatever they want to talk about. Unlike Foo Camp, people here sort of ambled up the board slowly, or hung back and put talks instead on the “session ideas” board, waiting for enough other attendees to put check marks next to the desired ones. It’s New England, we’re more reserved. Although there were a lot of gaps, especially on Sunday, it was a pretty good mix of topics.
I was excited to see John Resig talk about his astonishing Processing.js, but the presentation was more of an intro to Processing itself. Likewise the Google App Engine talk by Shimon Rura and Brian Olson (of Google) — they were both good overviews but I already knew the material. If the App Engine talk had more time I would’ve asked some questions about developing for non-relational databases, but 30 minutes is surprisingly short.
One lesson I have to keep re-learning is to not go to talks on subjects I know anything about, so after that I hit the “Future of Videogames” roundtable and that was the most fun. I appreciated hearing game developers agree that wasting players’ time — making people do repetitive or boring tasks — is increasingly frowned upon, the same way that modern interactive fiction eschews hunger puzzles and mazes. (For me the greatest innovation in Grand Theft Auto IV is being able to take cabs instead of driving across “Manhattan” all the time.)
The random conversations I had while waiting for pizza or talking to people in the lunchroom were a lot more enjoyable than the ones at conferences like ETech. Expensive conferences attract too many evangelists and not enough coders. Here I got to argue with people about text editors, Python debugging, which part of Java do you hate the most — and the one guy I met who was not a programmer apologized about it. It’s nice to meet other people who type, not talk, for a living.
Next Boston nerd event: Ignite Boston on May 29th, inconveniently up against the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference which will be my first significant chance to hit publishers up for jobs.