BarCampLondon3 - Day 2

Sunday morning saw various folks rise from the dead and gather for breakfast - another mighty catering WIN from Google's chefs - Full English if you so wished, fruit and cereals for those of a more delicate constitution.

It took a while for the brain cells to get going (copious amounts of coffee and fresh orange juice helped), so the first session I sat in on was the second of the day.

What To Teach The Next Gen Web Devs - Dan Dixon
Dan is a lecturer teaching today's university-age students about the web. His round-table discussion focussed on what sort of curriculum they should be getting, from a working designer/industry expert opinion. The whiteboard proved useful in splitting up the syllabus into 4 stages and brainstorming the essentials of what should be covered:

Universals:

• Accessibility as best practice, not an afterthought
• Make them aware of an international web (localisation issues)
• Good communications skills - ability to present their projects and lead discussions
• Need good writing skills for email, reports, blog posts
• Give them business context for their skills
• Point them towards the developer community

Foundation:

• Not too much emphasis on specific tools - teach basics of HTML/CSS
• Fundamentals of design
• Typography
• HCI and UX design
• The ideas of the web - a bit of history about the technology?
• Empowerment
• What is the web for? - show them it's not just Facebook
• Different ways of working
• Tell them about realistic career paths
• Basics of how to program

Middle:

• Practice-based
• CSS, JavaScript
• PHP/Ruby
• Wireframes/IA/Sitemaps
• Do usability testing
• Make sure something they have worked on is torn apart (might sound harsh, but it's going to happen sooner or later!)
• Small groups/projects
• Understand project management skills

Internship:

• Need good HTML/CSS skills so they are immediately useful - don't want to end up just making the tea
• Need to work as part of a team
• Know about browser testing
• How to interact with clients - people skills
• Innovation
• Time estimation
• Should be able to choose a path - Front End or Design or Programming or UX/IA and be able to gain relevent experience in that

End:

• More on localisation
• Project Manage a 2nd-year team
• Start a project from scratch
• More about business and how it works

It was a very thought-provoking session, and a few of us continued in well into the break. Then coffee called, so I ended up missing another session! Oh well.

Self Publishing - Vicky Lamburn
Vicky has self-published several fiction books and gave us some tips on the tools she uses for writing and typesetting (Word on Window), Lyx (for Ubuntu). Then she gave us a quick tour round the Lulu self publishing site. It is possible to get a book with ISBN - or self-promote, distribute, sell via web etc. In general, covers need to be 300dpi TIFF while text is usually send as a PDF (fonts only embedded where licencing is not an issue).

Then it was time for lunch! Still more food...

BarCamp Rhine - Sebastian "CB" Grünwaldt
CB gave a great presentation on the proposals for BarCampRhine, which basically involves BarCamp on a ship sailing from Basel (Switzerland) to Rotterdam (Netherlands), with static BarCamps in cities along the way, such as Basel, Karlsrühe, Mannheim, Köln, Strasbourg, and Rotterdam. The idea was originally suggested by Frenchman Sacha Lemaire and has been presented at various BarCamps in Europe since then.

[CB explaining the BarCampRhine idea to those in the room and in the chatroom]

If it goes ahead, it sounds like it will be a brilliant fortnight - but it needs lots of work and enthusiasm to make it happen - so if you are interested, go and sign up at the Wiki and let the other folks know you want to help. CB's talk led on nicely to Ryan Alexander's which followed:

Future of BarCamps - Ryan Alexander
Ryan's session involved asking two recent BarCamp organisers up on stage and asking some important questions about how much work was involved with putting on a BarCamp. Ian Forrester (London) and Oliver Berger (German BarCamps) kindly shared their experiences with us:

[Question Time]

Q. How long have you spent working on BarCamp?
A. Ian - Backstage are a sponsor, some time can be claimed from work time - at least a week's time.

Q. How much personal risk did you need to take?
A. Ian - does not put himself at risk, sponsors take the can. Oliver, some risk.

Q. How many others helped out?
A. Oliver 12-15. Ian 2 Googles.

Q. How many others would think about organising an event
A. Most people in room. Alistair organising one in Tyneside. Previous experience to give it a go.

Q. Norm - what would you do for a first step?
A. Get people to help - people who are passionate about it.

Q. How would you find those people?
A. Don't know (Norm). Ian - says its a lot easier to go it along to begin with. Oliver - don't need to look for passionate people - they will ask you if they can help.

Ryan's suggested BarCamp² - a BarCamp about organising a BarCamp. This seemed to go down well, and hopefully something concrete will begin to take shape soon.

[So meta, it hurts]

Anatomy of a Business Card - Ross Bruniges
Ross's lighthearted look at the power of a business card can be summarised as follows:

• Keep in touch with the people you meet up with.
• Once you have a name you can see where people are going - Flickr, etc
• Twitter - finding out what people are doing now.
• Upcoming - what's going to happen

He ended with a favourite photo of himself:

[Ross and his Pimp goblet]

Then we were all encouraged to exchange cards with folks in the room who didn't already have ours.

Rise & Inevitable Fall of Pub Standards - Dan Webb
In the beginning... Dan took us on a little historical tour on how PubStandards formed, why it's good and why you shoulnd't miss the next one:

[Who needs the conference?]

As the sessions came to a close, everyone reconvened in the main canteen for the farewell closing speeches. I think everyone agreed it was a spectacularly successful BarCamp, certainly the best I've been to.

The Highs? - brilliant wifi, food to die for, lots of geek toys to play with and plenty of friends old and new to hang out with, winning at Werewolf!

The lows? - not getting enough sleep, not wanting to leave! Roll on BarCampLondon4...

BarCampLondon3 - After Hours

If you're staying overnight (which is essential for the full BarCamp experience), then there isn't really an "after hours" - you just keep going for as long as there's a geek still standing.

After the first day's sessions came to a close, the socialising began in earnest. Here we see Mr Boozeniges living up to his name:

[First steps in drinking the mighty Google dry]

Inevitably, where geeks gather, there will be interminable rounds of Werewolf, for it is writ in Lore.

[Short break in a round of Werewolf. Cheer up! Anyone would think someone just died... oh wait!]

I think I must have played at least half a dozen games during the evening. But the most satisfying has to be the one that wrapped up around 5am - final round me [Werewolf] versus Tom Hughes-Croucher and Sebastian "CB" Grünwaldt [villagers] and Tom decides to nominate CB - mwahhaha! I win! Yum yum, tasty villagers.

Talking of tasty, as if the mountains of food served for dinner weren't enough, Google laid on a midnight feast for the geeks - freshly cooked waffles, pancakes and a chocolate fountain. Man, you could get soooo fat working here...

[The chocolate fountain - just had to be tried, didn't it?]

There were loads of games to play (Wii sports, tabletennis, fussball) and even a Segway to fool around with. However, Jan and CB, two of the crazy German LondonBubble guys decided they could go one better than the Segway with their two-seater "find":

[Ticket To Ride - CB drives with Jan on the back, looking justifyably worried]

But the weirdest trick of the evning must go to Oliver Uuberholz (another LondonBubble boy) who decided the empty beer fridges were going to waste and his Mac was getting too warm:
[Macs in the fridge]

Enough craziness, and being about dead on my feet by 5:30am, I went to find a quiet bit of floor to collapse on for 3 hours.

BarCampLondon3 - Day 1

The time for another BarCampLondon3 has rolled around, and I was lucky enough to get a ticket. We all turned up at Google's swanky offices in Victoria knowing we would have a good time, but not quite realising what a great time we were in for.

The organisation went very smoothly, the wifi was rock solid, there was more food, beer and snacks than even a BarCamp-load of geeks could consume (well, apart from the beer - it's the first time Google's fridges have been emptied, oops!)

As usual with an unconference, it was all about the sessions folks decided to give, and we were treated to some really thought-provoking and fun discussions. It was a shame that out of the 100 attendees, about 30 chose not to present. So the schedule was a little light at times, but that's not always a bad thing - nice to catch your breath every now and then! Jeremy marked up the timetable for us all to refer to easily.

The first session I went to was Tom Morris - Scraping Sucks - where he was giving us more usable alternatives to scraping HTML, namely doing clever stuff with GRDDL. He says it's much easier that way. As usual, I nodded sagely at the time, and then a couple of hours later, wondered what it was all about. Tom is a great geek, but he's several steps ahead of me when it comes to brain-wracking abilities :-) He's put up a page of GRDDL Profiles here - which lets you look at (X)HTML and with an XSLT transform, spits out XML/RDF which can be used as you want.
[Tom gets stuck in to his presentation]

Norm's Law
This was an excellent presentation from Mark Norman Francis. He gave us some very good reasons for doing code his way - especially for fostering interoperability betweeen different members of the team, or yourself coming back to code at a later date. Some points included:

• Use spaces not tabs
• Code goes no further than col 77
• No-one ever died from using too much whitespace
• Separate operators and braces - more of a cognitive burden to parse squashed up code
• Always indent by 4 spaces ONLY
• Line up assignments of variables (equals sign in the same place etc)
• Line up data tables too (arrays or whatever)
• Space keys out from brackets $vote[ $value }++; etc
• Space keywords out not functions
• Vertical rhythm - break bits up with comments for each sub part - make a story out of it
• Respect left-to-right comprehension
• K&R bracketing - opening brace should be tied to RHS end of line, closing brace should be on a new line - aligned with the starting coment
• Don't cuddle and else!
• One statement per line - you can easily miss the ";" in the middle of the line separating the two commands
• Break lines before operators - EXCEPT in JavaScript or it won't work
• Ignore operator precidence - use brackets to make it more "English readable"
• Use single quotes where possible - ' in PHP will just be stuffed in, " will make PHP parse the contents looking for variables
• Factor out long expressions and use intermediate variables (with english-sensible names) to break up
• Always use x on regexpressions
• Don't use camelCase! unless you're in JavaScript
• Systems Hungarian is harmful, Apps Hungarian is too
• All short variable names are harmful
• Use grammatical variable names and function calls
• Optimise for humans first! Machines - throw more hardware at it - but you can't refactor comprehension
• HTML indents use 2 spaces not 4
• Write the whole document FIRST before you do any CSS etc
• Insert Microformat classes
• Always use single quotes in attributes
• Inline CSS means you've done it wrong
• If it only works in JS don't
• VALIDATE
• Start with base stylesheets - reset, fonts, layout
• Use Uppercase tags in HTML
• Keep z-index below 50

[Norm - I can haz 4 skreenz]

Next up was a session about new developments from the BBC's web team:

BBC APIs First Look
PIPs is the system to list all broadcasted stuff - telly and radio

• bbc.co.uk/programmes
• Gives a list of all current programmes - by genre or alphabetically
• Nice URLs which can have .yaml or .json can be added for the feed in that format
• bbc.co.uk/programmes/formats
• Pid is the 8-character id for each episode - taken from user experience tests and will always be constant (never change)
• JSON and YAML are the two formats currently supported - XML coming? - RDF ontology has been produced
• RSS feed is coming so you could subscribe to know when "every episode of Doctor Who" is on
• Data model - "programme" can be brand, series or episode - an episode can have multiple versions (signed, extended etc) which then have broadcast (tv) or ondemand (iPlayer) times
• Historical data back to May 2006
• Can filter out to network (tv or radio) eg Radio4
• Next release (API stuff) in New Year
• http://catalogue.bbc.co.uk/ - is historical data - grand plan is to have them merged

DIY User Research - Leisa Reichelt
Leisa gave us lots of good advice on how to carry out some DIY user research - her premise being that it doesn't have to take days and days and cost big bucks - and often talking to more than half a dozen victims volunteers gives you diminishing returns. Leisa's slides are already available at the Slideshare BarCampLondon3 group.

Building Lifestream with Yahoo! Pipes - Cristiano Betta
I didn't take many notes as I was listening as I was actually playing with a real Yahoo pipe of my own and trying to follow along with what Cristiano had to say. I've been meaning to use Pipes to create my own Lifestream for some time, but had a quick go before and things weren't coming out as I wanted. Cristiano has done a series of excellent blog posts to get you going, or you can watch Tom Morris' video of Cristiano's presentation. Or view Cristiano's own Lifestream.

10 Things You Should Do In Project Management But Probably Don't - Gareth Rushgrove
Gareth's top ten tips:

1. Use Source Control software
2. Validate markup - XML, RSS, Atom and JSON
3. CSS validation
4. Broken Links! check them thoroughly - W3C Link checker
5. Performance - do you have metrics for measuring the performance - YSlow is a Firebug enhancement, httperf - use uptime checker too such as Pingdom
6. Maintainable Javascript - JSLint gives you good tips
7. Carry out Unit Testing
8. Carry out Functional tests
9. Asset Compilation
10. Building Scripts
    

More at morethanseven.net

Learning jQuery - Simon Willison
Simon gave us a lightining half hour tour of the jQuery Javascript library with great examples and succinct slides - you can get them from Slideshare. I've been meaning to beef up my JavaScript skills, and getting to grips with jQuery sounds like a good place to start.

[Simon talks about jQuery's Ajax capabilities]

Ask Them Anything
For the final sessions of day one, Norm and friends held an Ask Us Anything panel - just a bit of silliness to round off the proceedings before dinner. The guys from the Londonbubble did a live stream of the session to their mogulus chatroom, and it all got a bit recursive when this was put up on the main screen behind the guys:

[Behind you!]

The chatroom folks even got to ask a question or two - and Ross got a marriage proposal from a lady named Picki which he had to graciously decline!

[Ross, Norm and Ryan answer the online questions]

And so to dinner... but that's for another post.