Barcamp Galway Review

Barcamp Galway finally came around on Saturday. I enjoyed the day. Thanks to all the attendees, presenters, panelists, sponsors etc for making it work.

We had somewhere between 40 and 50 attendees on the day. There were 17 talks and 3 panel discussions. We had 3 rooms, 2 with talks going all day and 1 for breakout sessions. Conn Ó Muíneacháin [1] set up a live stream for one of the rooms. We used a jaiku channel [2] for live updates throughout the day.

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A few points about the day

New people. A lot of the regular barcamp crowd weren’t at this one. I didn’t know most of the people there and I think that for a lot of the attendees this was their first barcamp.

Lots of participation. Several of the talks were very informal and were driven by audience discussion. There were several talks in the breakout room that weren’t scheduled in advance.

The jaiku channel [4]. The jaiku channel worked well for communicating on the day. We had it on a big screen in the main conference room for a while. We updated it with what was happening from each room so people would know when talks were starting and it made it easier to move between talks as people didn’t need to check the board all the time and check different rooms to see what was on. People also gave running updates from talks they were attending. We also got several people who weren’t in attendance dropping in to say hello. Although I prefer twitter, I think that jaiku really shines for this kind of usage.

Networking. As usual, a lot of the value of Barcamp came from meeting people and talking to them about what they were working on (both at the event and in the pub afterwards). I got some really good pointers and ideas on what direction to take with my own work from talking to other people about their experiences and getting feedback from them on my own ideas.

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No-shows People signing up to attend and then not showing up is annoying. It’s fine not to come but it would be nice if you could let us know (As several people did via email, wiki, skype and twitter). Several trees, chickens and cows died needlessly in the organization of this Barcamp.

Talks I saw

I spent most of the day in room A which had most of the geeky talks.

James Cooley [6] talked about ubuntu and XP on the desktop. I was surprised that there were non-techies at this talk who seemed interested in using Ubuntu as a desktop alternative to XP.
Martha Rotter [7] talked about Ruby and Python with Silverlight. There were some code examples showing python scripting within Silverlight and from what I could gather there will be full ironruby scripting in Silverlight. I’m really interested in the idea of full python and ruby scripting in the browser and I’ll be looking into this a lot more over the coming months. Silverlight is the first time I can remember being excited about a Microsoft technology.
I caught the second half of Tom Raftery [8]’s talk about building an energy effecient/carbon neutral data center [9]. He talked about a lot of innovations they used to make their data-center more energy effecient. What surprised me was that bandwidth costs in Cork are more than three times those in Dublin. So all the energy effeciency innovations that they came up with were necessary to make their data-center competitive with those located in Dublin. This is a compelling example of how Ireland’s tech infrastructure is weighted towards Dublin. You start at a disadvantage if you want to locate a tech business outside of Dublin.
Walter Higgins [10] gave an overview of Amazon EC2 and how he uses it for load balancing at Pixenate. EC2 is fantastic for people who want to farm out computational tasks as needed.
I gave a talk about machine learning and data mining. I tried to keep it non-technical and explain it in a way that anybody could understand. I think I managed that and the people who were there seemed to find it interesting. I focused on how machine learning could be used in applications. I showed a demo of using machine learning for cancer diagnosis and credit card fraud prediction. I also showed a video of a model helicopter that could fly completely autonomously using software that learned to fly by observing human pilots.
Ina O’ Murchu [11] talked about the social web and how it could be used in business.
Kevin Noonan [12] talked about developing web applications with Django.
I chaired a panel discussion about starting a company in Ireland. The panel consisted of John Collison [13], Tom Raftery [14], Niall Larkin [15], John Breslin [15] and Alastair McDermott [16]. The people on the panel all had different experiences and perspectives on starting your own company. As someone who has just started out on the entrepreneurial trail I found the advice and experiences of the panel valuable.