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Barcamp Dublin Review

Posted April 23, 2007

I was at Barcamp Ireland 3 in Dublin yesterday. I met a lot of cool people and it was great to put faces to names. The best part of Barcamp was meeting and chatting to people outside of the talks: people from Ruby Ireland, people involved in Patchwork, people I met at the last Barcamp and people I’d never met before.

Compared to the last one there were more attendees but less talks. This time the talks were scheduled for one hour each so everything ran on time.

The main downside was a lack of web access. I think we were all trying to share a 2MB connection over two wireless routers and it didn’t work out. Only in Ireland could you have a “Digital Hub” with a 2MB connection :).

Apart from the wireless issue the venue and organization was excellent. Thanks to the organizers: Joe Drumgoole, Elly Parker, Eoghan McCabe and Paul Browne.

Talks

Jython for fun and profit - Sean McGrath.

This gave an introduction to python and jython. Sean gave examples of how jython can be used to script java applications, write servlets, write unit tests. There are lots of parts of the java developments cycle that can be much more productive by using a scripting language that interacts with java rather than using java itself. I agree with more or less everyting in this talk. I used python and jython a lot before I started using ruby. One thing I would add is that all the reasons to use jython also apply to jruby. Jruby is a java implemention of ruby in the same way that jython is a java implementation of python. However the jruby developers were recently hired by Sun to work full-time on jruby so it has a bit more steam behind it at the moment and may become the official scripting language for the java platform.

Web Usability 101: A 30-Minute Crash Course - Eoghan McCabe

Eoghan gave a great talk on usability and it generated some interesting discussion. It’s good to get people thinking about usability and how to create sites that are easy to use and navigate. It’s also good to point out examples of bad user interfaces so that people will recognize them and demand better from their designers and developers.

Selling Web 2.0 to Irish Financial Institutions - John Ward

John Ward gave a talk on how to pitch to financial institutions based on his experiences of the last year. I wanted to go to Paul Campell’s rails talk and Keith Bohanna’s GTD talk too but they were on at the same time as this one. John has his own startup, Cenegal (they used rails to develop their application but this talk wasn’t about the technology) and relayed a lot of the things he had learned in the last year when pitching to large organizations. This was really interesting to me as it’s the sort of stuff that I know nothing about. Some of the main points were:

  • Avoid IT Department
  • Get to the right person within an organization
  • Focus on Business benefits
  • Know the market
  • Know marketing costs and have marketing plan
  • Listen to feedback
  • Technical excellence != commercial success

Using Semantic Web for Social Media Sites - Uldis Bojars

Uldis Bojars from DERI gave a talk on SIOC. SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) is an RDF vocabulary for describing things like blogs, forums, mailing lists etc. This talk gave some good overview of the Semantic Web and how it can be used to build richer applications. There was quite a bit of interest in this talk: we had to move to a bigger room as half the people were standing the talk and discussion went on for over an hour and a half. Uldis also gave an interactive demo of using RDF with python showing that RDF is actually quite simple to use.

Other Reviews

Here are some other reviews I have spotted so far: