Barcamp Bournemouth 2

Over the weekend of 10th/11th April the second Barcamp to be held in Bournemouth took place at Bournemouth University with over 70 participants in attendance. The sponsors of this year's event were: Red Web, G3 Show, BCS, C4L, Fibreband and Squizzleapp.

Sessions I went to on Saturday

Usability vs Accessibility - Phil Heywood and Luke Guppy
In this session Phil and Luke gave the pros and cons of Usability vs Accessibility and how they should be carefully considered in web projects as one may conflict with the other. They gave examples of the downsides of JQuery and what we can do to improve the accessibility if people have Javascript turned off in the browser.

Smashing Mag sucks or how to blag it as a webdesigner - Rich Quick
In this talk, Rich gave examples of application websites that were obvious rip-offs of each other in terms of design and content. He also questioned who is to blame for designs looking the same, the designer or online articles and tutorials.

Creativity - top 10 tips for better brainstorming - David Burton
In David's presentation he gave the understanding of creativity, how it works and how we can get the most out of brainstorming. He went through the fives types of creative behaviour including Fact Finding, (Re) organising, Improvising, Meaning and Maverick and how people can sometimes shift between them. He also went through how we can come up with freshness and new ideas.

Rolling a turd in glitter, 10 steps to design awesomeness - Damian Proctor
In this talk Damian examined various websites and different design techniques in each site and how they are used effectively. The 10 steps that Damian talked about were: Power of 3, Leading the eye, Creating emotions with elements, Contrast, Hierarchy of type, Whitespace, Unity, Depth, Grids and Colours.

Chat roulette - Dom Hodgson
You know the score.

The rest of Saturday night was spent generally hanging about and playing a few games of Werewolf including probably the best game I've played which had Cristiano as the moderator and no werewolfs were involved. Lets just say it made for a very interesting game.

Sessions I went to on Sunday

XSS with JQuery - Kevin Prince
In this presentation, Kevin showed how we can use widgets across sites using JQuery and JSON and how XSS isn't always evil.

Get Inspiration for Photography - Martin Cunningham
In this session I gave examples of how we can get inspiration for photography when you aren't really inspired to get out with the camera.

Version control with Git - Abizer
In this session Abizer talked about version control with Git and commands that can be used to make life easier when dealing with version control.

Lightning talks - Various Speakers
A session including various 5 minute presentations given by a number of speakers.

As always for these types of events a big thank you to the Organisers, Sponsors and the Attendees. Oh and also Dom and Heather for the cups of tea in Leeds.

Barcamp North East 3

The weekend of 20th and 21st March saw the arrival of the 3rd Barcamp North East to come to Newcastle which also marked the end of Newcastle Science Fest, a ten day event which aims to increase the North East's enthusiasm for science and to encourage the younger generation to consider a career in the science field.

Barcamp North East 3 was held in the Center of Life, Newcastle. A contemporary science and learning center just round the corner from Newcastle Central Station.


Saturday

Sessions I attended on Saturday were (not in any particular order):

Paypal Hacking - Tim Nash
Tim Nash gave a talk on the PayPal API and how it can be used in your own projects.

Finding Creativity - James Rutherford
A discussion on how designers, developers and other creative types find creativity in the everyday world.

Scaling :: Scaling Lingscars.com
A presentation on how lingscars.com could be upscaled for higher performance on the web.

Real Time Web or having a socket in the browser - Alex Kavanagh
Alex gave a talk about real-time updates on the web using Django, COMET, STOMP and Morbid Q and the issues that he has faced.

80s Video Games Anonymous - James Rutherford
A round circle discussion and quiz about 80s video games

The Modern Day Interview - Martin Cunningham
After being on the job hunt for 3 months now, I decided to give a session on the modern day interview and the ups and downs of job hunting. The main point of the presentation was to say that we need things like standard ways of doing things such as job application forms as one is never the same as the other and how interviews need to be brought down a notch and not be so formal.

How to impress the ladies with JQuery - Rich Quick
Rich quick gave a session about the basics of JQuery and where beginners can find resources to help them out. Rich's slides for this presentation can be found over at richardquickdesign.com

Dr Horribles Singalong - Everyone
A singalong to Dr Horrible's Singalong blog which was created exclusivly for Internet distribution.

Powerpoint Kareoke - Dom Hodgson
A favourite session of mine as it is always so funny and yet so random. After volunteers have been chosen, they each must present an impromtu random presentation which they know nothing about. A very parody based session as it presents the absurdity that many business presentations are.

Usual Barcamp games such as Warewolf
A question I will never let down after this Barcamp: "Martin, are you the seeer?"



Sunday

Sessions I attended on Sunday were (not in any particular order):

Breakfast at Spoons
A few poeople including Dom, Tim, Leeky, Cristiano, Melinda, Carolyn, Heather and myself went for a breakfast to start the day in Wetherspoons not too far for the venue.

Stop taking photos - Chris Neale
Chris gave a talk on why cameras and laptops should be left back at home when attending conferences and events. The argument was that when you take technology to a conference it takes you away from the event and not as much enjoyment is to be had. Also the other side of the story was do the photos taked of an event really portray the day to other people.

Get off your arses, no excersise required - Tim Nash
In this talk, Tim explained some of the projects that he had worked on and how you can make money out of niche ideas.

Chat Roulette - Dom Hodgson
Dom held another round of chat roulette on Sunday afternoon. Following from what Dom had previously said to me on the Saturday, I had to go along to this session to see what it was all about!

Daily Dragon, the upstart friend of Mr Duck - Caz Mockett
Following on from the Duck365 project that Alistair has worked on, Caz has decided to do a Dragon365 with a little purple dragon called Dai and it's lion friend Leo. This talk was an introduction to the project and a show and tell of the pictures that the dragon is currently up to.

On the Sunday afternoon I hung around for a few drinks, then Caz, Alistair, Carolyn, Tim and I went for a Japanese meal, this was then followed my Tim, Carolyn and I heading back to the Head of Steam for a few more drinks before they travelled back down to Leeds with Dom and Heather.

Barcamp North East 3 was yet another awesome weekend. A big thank you should go to the people who helped out such as Yahoo Developer Network, Microsoft, Center of Life, Newcastle Science Fest, SuperMondays and of course Alistair who organised the whole thing.

A big shout out should also go to the attendees: Alex Kavanagh, Alistair McDonald, Brian Degger, Sarah Degger, Ian Simmons (Center of Life), Stewart (Center of Life), Carolyn Jones, Caz Mockett, Chris Neale, Cristiano Betta, Danni Matzk, David Batty, Dom Hodgson, Heather Burke, Eric Nelson, Harry Palmer, Ian Puncey, James Rutherford, Robert Lee Cann, Mick Cunningham, Melinda Seckington, Neil Crosby, Mr Duck, Dai the Dragon, Peter Bull, Rebecca Parker, Rich Quick, Richard Hyatt, and Tim Nash for making it such as great weekend.

Barcamp Bradford

Bradford's first ever Barcamp event was held on 14th November 2009 at the WOW Academy and the National Media Museum in the heart of the city.

I thought this was a very interesting Barcamp, due to two main things in particular. First point was the amount of first timers, people who had never been to Barcamps before, around 80% of the attendees which meant a lot of new content and ideas were discussed making it very refreshing.

Second point, this Barcamp was held over two different venues, which split the day up nicely. The morning was held in the WOW academy and after lunch it was moved over to the National Media Museum about 10 minutes walk from the starting point.

Sessions I attended during the day were:

Rethinking the Presentation (Stop the killing): This talk was given by Ian Smith. Ian talked about how to stop death by Powerpoint, and how we should think and plan presentations through using mind maps etc. before even reaching for the computer. He also gave some top tips on how to present and use presentations without boring people, and why we shouldn't use Powerpoint for everything which we present on. Ian's slide deck for this talk can be found on here.

Visual trends in web design since 1996: Monica Tailor gave this presentation showing various different design trends which we have seen throughout the years in web design and how we sometimes still use them. Monica showed examples of Frames, Drop Shadows, Tiled background images, Tables Of Contents, Flash intros, Tabbed navigation, Candy buttons and Blog designs. She then talked about current trends such as Transparency, Font replacement, Hand drawn fonts, large fonts and that we have to accept the users of Internet Explorer 6 will have to expect something slightly different with it being an older browser with older technologies.

Google's Hidden Gems: John Mclear, gave a run down of Google projects including Google Android, Analytics, Webmaster tools, Adwords and Adsense etc. and the hidden gems we can find within them.

Photography is not a crime - Know your rights as a UK photographer: I presented this session following on from the response I received at Barcamp London 7, and I was interested to get a general concensus of views within Bradford around this topic. I talked about what rights you have as a photographer in the UK. I also showed a short video which was filmed in London, again about photographers rights, but it also brought up some important points about photography in public, security cameras and the Big Brother state. An open discussion was held at the end of the session and some important points/subjects/ideas were raised by the attendees.

The ultimate to do list - 101 goals in 1001 days: Alex Wolf gave a very interesting presentation on a project she is working on called '101 of a Wolf' which involves completing 101 goals in 1001 days. More information about her project can be found over at the blog.

Free Software: This was a round circle discussion led by John Leach regarding the ins and outs of free software and how people can use it and contribute to free software projects.

Barcamp Bradford are hoping to hold another event around May 2010 next year, however I may have to visit earlier than that due to the fact that I didn't have a walk round the National Media Museum whilst I was there which looked amazing.

A big thank you should go to Ian Green for organising the event and to the following sponsers: Screen Yorkshire, Yorkshire Forward, National Media Museum, Panoetic, Frogtrade, Shipley College, BMedia, GREEN Communications, University of Bradford and Challenge CLC.

Barcamp London 7

Over the weekend on 24th/25th October 2009 I attended Barcamp London 7 at IBM South Bank, London. This is a writeup of the weekend.

Originally I wasn't going to sign up for this event due to the very high demand for tickets, again going within seconds of the release time, but this time the Barcamp London planning team had tried a few different ways of releasing the tickets.

The first round of tickets were given away through a game of Hide and Seek in the city, which involved the team giving out various clues and coordinates of their whereabouts. The second round of tickets were released through a lottery style draw and the third round of tickets were released using the usual release and everyone rushing for them, however this time there was more emphasis on new attendees who had signed up.

Now consdering I wasn't going to sign up at first, I thought this event would be far too good to miss, so I thought just for a laugh I'll put my name into the lottery draw and see what happens, If my name didn't get picked then so what there will be more in the future....

It was to my surprise that I recieved an email the following Saturday informing me that I had won a ticket, I sat there and thought "Now what?" as I wasn't expecting to get a ticket at all. I confirmed as I thought it'll be rude not to go down and booked a return train ticket (£80) for the weekend.

Saturday 24th October

Saturday morning started far too early for my liking as it involved getting to Durham train station for the 4:45 train to London Kings Cross.

3 hours later I had arrived in London, the next challenge was to get from LGX to IBM Southbank with no knowledge whatsoever of London, The Underground or any streets for that matter. I worked out the Tube map and headed over to Waterloo Station using Victoria Line, then Bakerloo. As a first timer in London I was very impressed with the Tube and how quick it can be for getting over London in a short space of time.

I arrived at IBM (after asking 2 helpful PCSOs where it was, they then pointed out it was the buliding in front of me) around 8:50 which was far too early as the registration didn't open till 9:30, so I decided to play tourist for half hour and headed down to the London Eye.

Returning to IBM around 9:20 people had started to gather, for the doors opening. Doors opened at 9:30 and after checking past IBM security and handing my ticket over I had finally arrived at Barcamp London 7. The morning had been a complete blur till this point!

I caught up with a few people who I knew and started talking to few people I'd never met whilst grabbing a couple of coffees (sponsored by Starbucks). Once everyone had been signed in we then headed around to the large seating area for the opening talk given by Cristiano, Kevin and Melinda.

Following the opening talk people were placed into different rooms for a team building challenge: To build bridges...out of Lego, I think this worked really well as to go round a room of 200 people to get names and interests would have taken too long, but by doing it this way in small groups it was easier to remember names etc.

After the ice breaking session, the rush was then on to put sessions on the grid. 9 rooms were provided over the 2 days which allowed for an imense amount of sessions to be held. I didn't have a session prepared, but I had thought of a one during the train journey down which involved photographers rights in the UK. I thought it would be a good session to bring up at a London event as I had read previously that police officers and security guards etc had been hassling photographers in the city for looking "suspicious". I placed this on the Sunday grid as it would give me the Saturday evening and Sunday morning to put something together.

Sessions started around 12 noon, which included a session aimed at Barcamp newcommers to give them the low down on what the events are all about and how to get involved.

I decided to skip the first set of sessions as I was still getting myself sorted out and just chatting to other attendees.

Sessions I attended through the day:

#themineproject - "asocial" software. Use social software to interpret private sharing: The talk from Alec Muffet gave a demonstration of the project and how people can use and share information both privately and publicly using online data and relationship logistics. More information about the project can be found here: The mine Project.

Duck 365 - A year in the life of Mr Duck... Or a photography project gone very very wrong (Mr Duck and Alistair) by Mr Duck and Alistair: I've been following Alistair's Duck 365 project since it started now and it was good to see a talk given on the project, how it has evolved, the relationship between Mr Duck and the "Hippy" and where it all began. However this talk started a small theme for the weekend...Ducks (More on that later).

Photo by: Rain Rabbit

SEERS - Standardised Bug Reporting: Anthony kennedy gave a talk on how we should use a set of rules and abide by them if we want standardised Bug Reporting for websites and applications, and how companies should embrace these if they want to increase Bug fixing productivity.

Stuff you shouldn't tweet that I have: Dominic Hodgson talked abit about himself and some of his blog posts which he has published. He also demonstrated some of the things you really shouldn't tweet about!

Google Wave WTF!: I've heard a lot of stuff about Google Wave and I just wanted to know what all of the fuss was about. The session revolved around people trying Google Wave live in the room, how we could make things better and how we could use it for the likes of Barcamp communities by using APIs etc.

Presenting time on the web (time, urls, linked data): Jonathan Tweed from the BBC talked about how we can present date and time in a variety of different ways and how we can use dates/times in URLs and with linked data.

Release London's Data - Feedback from #londonsdata: Unfortunatly I didn't really understand much of the talk as I think it revolved more around people living in the city rather than people living outside of it.

Balsamiq Mockups (Got some free licenses to hand out!): I have been looking into Wireframing tools recently and unfortunatly not found many free ones out there. You have to pay for Balsamiq, but it is relativly cheap and it looked a decent product. Cristiano gave a brief talk and demonstration about the basics of the software and how designers and developers can liase with one another and the clients.

Sex and other things we don't talk about. Ian Forrester from BBC Backstage held an open discussion about why we don't talk about sex and other such things in day to day life. Some interesting questions were brought up in this session inluding "If you asked to produce a website of adult nature by a client, would you turn it down?". The discussion also included the recent happenings with Yahoo and the Open Hack day in Taiwan.

Why I give web clients no control over their project (and why they love it): Alex gave a talk about why he doesn't let his clients have any control over their project. All content for websites are written by himself and websites are normally of small size, but give a lot of important information over a few pages. He also talked about how well he is doing and how the companies are doing by taking this no control over the project approach.

During the evening a number of games were held in the communial area, these included Werewolf, Munchkin, Carcassone, and a LAN game organised by Dom. It was nice just to sit back and chill out after the day full of sessions. Most of the night I just hung around and talked to Alistair, and Caz also taking a few photos inbetween. Pic & Mix was provided and Pizzas were ordered in around 1am.

One thing which turned out a bit of a coincidence at this event was the changing of the clocks. At Barcamp London 6 earlier in the year, the clocks went forward an hour. At this Barcamp they went back an hour.

Theme - Ducks

By the end of the weekend, a theme was running through the Barcamp and that was ducks. Earlier in the day, Alistair had presented a session about his Duck365 project and after this ducks just took over the IBM building. Plastic ducks were turning up everywhere, in the plants, around the lego and even in the toilets. Alistair got rather freaked out by all of this and everywhere he looked there seemed to be a duck!

I finally dragged myself to a floor for some sleep around 2:30am as I was on my last legs after being up so early on Saturday morning back at home.

Sunday 26th October

I managed to get a good couple of hours sleep on the carpeted floor (A lot more comfortable than Barcamp Brighton) and woke up around 5:30. I grabbed a coffee, got changed and set about putting my presentation together for later in the day.

Whilst having breakfast later in the morning, I processed and uploaded the photos from Saturday to Flickr whilst waiting for the Sunday sessions to start.

Sessions I attended through the day:

Mono: Running .NET on Linux/Apple/*NIX: This talk revolved around what Mono is and how we can use it to run .Net on Linux /Apple and *nix platforms.

Polishing a turd: This talk, given by Adrian Long gave ideas and what we can do when inheriting a monstrosity of a web project which you arn't allowed to start over. Tips were given for not just when you get bad code, but bad Information Architecture, bad UI, and bad ideas.

Growing the Developer Community: How can we get more people, more events, more conversations - and less confusion? - Dylan Beattie had paired up with Sebastien Lambla for this talk. They talked about LonDev an Information source for software developer community events in London. They also talked about the likes of AltNetBeers and other ways and means of getting the geek community involved.

Developer Happiness: This was an open discussion by David Flanders about what makes developers happy either at home or in the work environment.

Photography is not a crime (Know your rights as a photographer in the UK): I did a small presentation bringing up important rights which photographers have in the UK. I also showed a short video which was filmed in London, again about photographers rights, but it also brought up some important points about photography in public, security cameras and the Big Brother state. An open discussion was held at the end of the session and some important points/subjects/ideas were raised by the attendees.

Lightning Talks: A number of 5 minute sessions including Dabbr, Travel Expense Calculator, Retro Hacking, Mobile Wikipedia without the Internet and MyFi via IPhone.

Teach Me How To Run A New BarCamp - Cultures, Languages (BSL): A very interesting session about running a Barcamp for the deaf community. What is needed and the best way to go about things.

Devs vs Ops - Good vs Evil: A role play of Operations teams getting in the way of Developers and Developers getting in the way of the Operations teams in companies.

Tom and Dom's Big Quiz - with ultimatly dissapointing prizes!: Tom and Dom's quiz spectacular with no spectacle guaranteed! Very funny and would suggest anyone to turn up to this at future Barcamp events.

After the quiz had finished, the closing speech was then held, Cristiano thanked everyone for such a great event, he also thanked the organisers and the sponsers.

A massive thank you and a big shout out should go to the following people and sponsors for such a great weekend of fun.

Cristiano Betta , Paul Brannigan, Mary Rose Cook, Tobias Kunisch, Robert Lee-Cann, Caz Mockett, Tom Morris, Kevin Prince, Melinda Seckington, Dan W, Zoe Slattery from IBM, Security staff, and of course the ATTENDEES. (I know I've probably missed a load of people off)

IBM, Nestoria, TechSmith, The Team, Be Broadband, The Proactive Accountant, lastminutelabs, Nudge Social Media, Vodafone Group, Geekery.in, JISC, Nexus Globalnet, Starbucks VIA, PayPal, Guardian Open Platform, myMuesli and Nokia.

Links

Some people have already blogged about this event, and you can find them here:

Melinda's Blog - A writeup from the "other side" of Barcamp
Andy Piper - Barcamp London 7
Zoe Slattery - The other side of IBM
Semblance - Barcamp London 7
Pixel Diva - Expand the awesome
Ben Fletcher - Barcamp London 7

Photos of the event have also been uploaded to the London Barcamp Flickr Group.

Barcamp Blackpool 2009

On Saturday 17th October 2009 Blackpool hosted its first ever Barcamp event organised by Gemma Cameron at the Paradise Rooms in Pleasure Beach.

This was only a one day event, so I decided to drive down early on the Saturday morning. I arrived at the venue around 9:15, signed in and started helping getting things ready for the day.

Once people finished arriving, Gemma gave her opening speech and welcomed everyone to the event, in typical Barcamp style everyone then went rushing to the session grid to secure a session slot and work out which sessions they wanted to attend. People were hesitant to take up the first session slot, Kian Ryan was asked if he wanted to take one of the first slots, his reponse was "No because I haven't yet written the source code for my session yet!", I think this is one thing that attracts me to Barcamps, the whole "rough around the edges" atmosphere to them and thinking of things on the spot.

The schwag was impressive for this event, mugs from the Gaurdian, a few things from Yahoo, but the best of all was the Barcamp Rock (...and yes it did have "Barcamp" through the middle of it).

Three rooms were setup for the day named "Donkeys", "Tower" and "Rock". The sessions I attended during the day were:

• Co Working, Collaboration, Virtual Boards and Masterminds
• "Hello World" with Amazon EC2, PHP and Mono.
• Review of the W3c website redesign (Which turned ou to be very ironic)
  
• Accessibility, Content and Cognition
• JQuery and why it's your new best friend
• How to make Barcamp Blackpool better
• Building and releasing an Android App.
  

I also presented a session myself called "Your photo is currently unavailable, Flickr Censorship".
More frequently Flickr are now censoring user accounts, groups and content on the site and after reading numerous blog posts on the subject I thought it was about time to present a session a a Barcamp about it.

After the sessions wrapped up it was down to the local chippy for a chippy tea, fabulous I have to say and well worth a fiver. It took Caz, Alistair and I about an hour to get back to the venue as we used this as a photowalk oppertunity, which was great as Blackpool Iluminations were also taking place (however someone left his tripod in the car).

Once we got back to the venue, the bar was open with a very very generous Bar tab put on by Yahoo!, unfortunatly with me driving back I could only drink pop which was a bit of a let down.

Entertainment for the evening was provided by a magician called Paul Sylvester and Iam sure other people will agree, he was the funniest magician I've ever seen, top entertainment! Tunes then followed and the night wrapped up.

Tags:
Tags for this event were: #barcamp, #barcampblackpool, #bcblackpool, #blackpool

Barcamp Brighton 4 - How I do like to be beside the sea

During the weekend of 5th and 6th of September 2009 I attended my 2nd Barcamp, Barcamp Brighton 4 and I have to say I had a brilliant weekend.

Tickets went like hot cakes for this event, most being taken within minutes of the release time, but I managed to get a ticket on the second wave of releases.

With Brighton being a very long distance from home I made a long weekend of it and took the Friday and Monday off work (Mainly for travellling), this is writeup of the weekend.

Friday 4th September

I decided to drive to the event, yes granted I know it is a 680 mile round trip which includes that road called the M25, but by doing this I got a lot of experience driving away from my local area and I also cut my travelling costs by about 1/2, If I were to have got the train.

Alistair was also heading to the event and had sent me a DM on Twitter on the Friday morning asking if I could pick him up from St Albans on the way down, I agreed and set off from home around 11am.

The drive to St Albans was mostly uneventful, with travelling during the day there was a lot of traffic on the M1. I made a couple of stops on the journey, firstly stopping at Ferrybridge, then Watford Gap (£1.11 litre for petrol) to get Alistair's post code then onto St Albans.

Note to self: Putting the wrong postcode into a Sat Nav really doesn't help and may have an impact on journey time or even being on the wrong side of town as to what you are supossed to be on.

Alistair and I set off, stopping for petrol on the way (cheaper than what I was paying back at home) then made our way onto the M25 with help from Mr Duck.
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/alistair_uk/3898080940/in/set-72157612156433747/)

I arrived in Brighton around 9pm and parked up at @vickyjo's, met her and @neilcrosby who were also going to the event that weekend. I now know how difficult parking in Brighton is and a massive thank you has to go to Vicky for giving me a couple of guest parking permits and the paper map which she printed out for me (Better than GPS I say!).

Around 11pm after a cup of tea and a bite to eat (again provided by Vicky) I headed down to the hotel that I had booked a couple of weeks before hand. The Hotel was the New Maderia Hotel: http://www.newmaderiahotel.com. (I had booked in for the Friday (£50) and Sunday (£30)), as I was stopping at the venue on Saturday night. I was very impressed with the hotel room and the staff and would definatly recomend it for anyone stopping in Brighton overnight.

Saturday 5th September

The morning of Barcamp Brighton 4 and I had to be out of the hotel by 11am, so I set off for the venue at around 10:15. The venue was just around the corner from the hotel, opposite Brighton Dome. The venue was the Old Music Library, currently a run down place providing hosting to numerous artworks and models.

Registration and introductions then followed. Instead of the normal 3 tag intros, 1 secret had to be given from each participant, goodie bags were also handed out following a recyled bag theme thought up by Ellen De Vries. The bags had come from different locations around the world (later on Sunday night back at the hotel I noticed that mine had come from NYC).

After the introductions time was given for participants to place sessions on the grid, I decided to put mine on the Sunday grid, as it would give me a little extra time to work on it if needed.



The room names were as follows:

• Grouch's Trashcan
• Hong Kong Fooy's filing cabinet
• Fraggle Rock
• Womble Common
• Ninja Turtle Sewer
• The Doozer's Mine
• Danger Mouse's post box
• Top Cat Alley (Outside)

The sessions I attended during the day were:

• URIs, Language and Reference
  
• The future of UX
  
• The art of natural seduction
  
• Photowalk (Caz Mockett)
  
• Web typography (Presented by Helen - DigitalBlonde)
  
• Getting coding mojo back by writing small things (Paul Silver)
  
• Automate website deployment (stop using FTP) (Gareth Rushgrove)

After the sessions had finished, copius amounts of pizza and beer were provided (Cold pizza still being eaten on Sunday morning) and electrorock band 100 robots played in the lower floor, these guys were brilliant and everyone enjoyed them.



I spent most of Saturday night basically just catching up with everything, processing and uploading the days photos to my flickrstream and hanging out with Melinda Seckington, Christino Betta and Kevin Prince. Various trips were made downstairs to see how Warewolf was getting on. By about 2-3am I was ready for sleep.

Sunday 6th September

After a bad couple of hours sleep (mainly cat napping) on a wooden floor, I woke up and got myself pulled together for the second day of the event. Breakfast was provided (even though most people were still trying to get through the mountain of cold pizza left over from the night before). I headed out to the local Coffee shop which we had been given vouchers for with a number of the attendees. We headed back and the sessions had just started.

I presented my session in the morning, the session was titled "CrimeMapper - Bringing Local (and National) crime data to you". The session gave an introduction to CrimeMapper and how we could possibly use the data (provided in XML or CSV formats) to build other information giving resources. Good feedback was given and ideas were exchanged, definatly a thing to look at in the future.



The sessions I attended during the day were:

• Alistair waffles on about security (Alistair MacDonald)
  
• Should I give my stuff away for free or the Creative Commons dilema? (Dom Pates)
  
• Making "FAIL" more fun (Dawa Riley)
• Importance of Backup at Magnolia (VickyJo)

The event then drew to a close with a last minute speech from the organisers. (Jon Markwell, Jo and Ellen De Vries) A big thank you should go out to the organisers, following sponsers: Yahoo! Developer Network, Paypal, Metranet, The Guardian Open Platform, Madgex, Vodaphone Group UK and all of the Microsponsers for making the weekend possible.

After checking into the hotel for the evening I headed back into town, met Alistair and Vicky and we decided to have an Italians to wrap up the weekend.

Monday 7th September

Again I had to be out of the hotel by 11, so with bags packed I headed up to Vicky's to get the car and to head home. At this point I was slightly dissapointed of not doing the whole Brighton thing, like the Pier and other tourist attractions, it just seemed wrong coming this far and not actually having a full day walkabout, however onwards I continued.

I arrived at Vicky's had a cup of tea and was ready to set off, but Alistair and I decided to go for a small photowalking session to fill in a couple of hours and maybes grab a bite to eat, hopefully hitting the road North about 2pm... this didn't happen.

On the photowalk (yes I did get pooped on by a passing seagull) we managed a circular(ish) route taking in things such as the Promonade, Pier and Electric railway. I was really impressed by the amount of awesome graffiti in Brighton and was pleased that we got out and captured it. On the way back to Vicky's we called in the Skiff and got a short tour of the building. The Skiff is a great idea, whereby you can pay a certain amount of money for desk space for an amount of time and it seemed a pretty cool place to work, very relaxed and friendly place to be.




We then continued on up to Vicky's, packed up the car, said our goodbyes and headed North bound about 5pm.