Last Weekend I went to BarCamp Munich 08. BarCamps are social events where web-related people, bloggers, developers and others meet for a so-called “unconference”. You’ll find a lot of presentations, discussions and workshops there and every participant is invited to give a session himself, no matter whether it is about technical, social or other aspects of the web.
BarCamps are free to all participants. The organization of such an event is a big logistical and financial task. At pidoco° we support those events that strengthen the community and enjoy taking part ourselves, so we decided to contribute back as an official sponsor and as an active helper. So I spent a few hours at the coffee booth to support Sonntagmorgen, who could not come themselves but served the Barcamp with their delicious coffee.
At the booth – and all around the camp – I got to talk to a lot of people, new contacts as well as friends from past events. It was a nice surprise to meet a few people who already knew pidoco°. Later I managed to take part in some sessions, too. There was a quite interesting discussion about user experience in general (you’ll find a good summary in Hendrik’s blog in German language) and good technical presentations e.g. about scaling and monitoring web applications.
Two young Germans, Rizqi and Robert, impressed me with their talk about chain.js, an extension to the Javascript library JQuery. Using chain.js you can link Html-Dom objects with plain JavaScript objects dynamically: when an object changes a property, the linked counterpart will be updated as well. This automatism simplifies a lot of work for developers of interactive web sites.
To my perception the BarCamp Munich 08 was a big success with a top location and great organizers. Steffen and his whole team were always around and did an extraordinary job. Next week end there’ll be BarCamp Berlin 09. This time I’ll be there “just” as participant. So I hope to take part in more sessions this time and maybe give one or two myself.
Silvan