Barcamp Bristol was brilliant

photo of my slot on the timetable

The first Barcamp Bristol ran on Friday evening and all-day Saturday and was completely ace.

Many many thanks to Laura, Alex and Tim for doing the organising and for pulling together such a great mix of people, talks and pure fun!

My talk, “A very personal webserver”, was about the port Nokia have made of Apache2 to the Symbian OS – that is to say, you can now run a webserver from your phone and use their port of Python plus mod_python (and a number of other modules) to expose any data already on your phone to the outside world over HTTP. I’ll make another post about it, but for now my slides are on slideshare and I’ll put the original OpenOffice Impress file up here, too.

As is traditional we played Werewolf, three rounds, but there weren’t many of us playing so I ended up as a Seer (throat ripped out), then a Werewolf (killed by a baying mob), and a Werewolf again (feasted on villagers ‘til the end of time). Many thanks to Pete for, I strongly suspect, throwing the last game for the sake of sportsmanship 🙂

Anyway, I got to meet lots of bright, local people, learn lots of new things, and drink free beer. I’m not really sure how it could have been any better.

There are loads of photos on Flickr tagged with “barcampbristol” (I’m the one in the bright red tee).

BarcampBristol 12-13th October

BarCamp Bristol logo

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants

Bristol will be holding its first-ever BarCamp this year on Friday October 12th and Saturday 13th. It costs a fiver to sign up, and the first rule of Barcamp is that if you are attending BarCamp, you must present.

The wiki page with all the information is here, and links through to payment details. Sign up!

I have no idea what I can talk about. My Arduino maybe? XMPP? I don’t really know anything – PVR/media shifting and how it filters to consumers? I’m going to guess that the audience will mostly be non-heavy techie. Any ideas?