Simon Willison's Weblog: barcamp

What is the best way to setup a conference website for a barcamp?

2013-11-20T10:55:00+00:00

My answer to What is the best way to setup a conference website for a barcamp? on Quora

Since BarCamps are arranged by the attendees, I personally think the wiki-style schedule editing we support at Lanyrd makes it an ideal fit. Speakers can attach their slides to their session pages afterwards.

Tags: barcamp, quora

Automating web site deployment at Barcamp Brighton

2009-09-06T14:16:30+00:00

Automating web site deployment at Barcamp Brighton

I’m determined to start using Fabric and proper deployment scripts for my personal projects.

Tags: barcamp, barcampbrighton, brighton, deployment, fabric, gareth-rushgrove

I've (probably) been using Google App Engine for a week longer than you have

2008-06-01T03:02:42+00:00

I've (probably) been using Google App Engine for a week longer than you have

My snappily titled App Engine introduction, presented at BarCamp London 4.

Tags: barcamp, barcamplondon, barcamplondon4, google-app-engine, my-talks

BarCampLondon3

2007-10-10T17:20:59+00:00

BarCampLondon3

24th-25th of November in Google’s London offices (by Victoria train station). The last BarCamp London was a blast—I’m really looking forward to this.

Tags: barcamp, barcamplondon, google, london

Sumo! A Generic Microformats Parser For JavaScript

2007-02-09T10:57:20+00:00

Sumo! A Generic Microformats Parser For JavaScript

Dan Webb’s BarCamp talk on Metaprogramming JavaScript will be a must-see.

Tags: barcamp, dan-webb, javascript, microformats, sumo

What I'm excited about, post-conference edition

2006-09-22T00:25:11+00:00

Wow, I've had a really busy month. I've attended (and spoken at) BarCamp London, Media in Transition, d.Construct, RailsConf Europe, Euro Foo and EuroOSCON. All were excellent, and each one nicely complemented the others. I'm exhausted. I think my brain is full.

My favourite question to ask new people I meet at conferences is "what are you excited about?". It's better than "what do you do?" (their job might not be as exciting as what they do in their spare time) and often gets a really interesting reply. People often ask me the same back, so here are three things that have been catching my attention recently.

OpenID. It's criminal that so few people are playing with this. I gave talks about it at both BarCamp and Euro Foo - it's decentralised single sign-on that works, and it's trivial to implement thanks to really solid libraries for most programming languages. There's also a $5,000 bounty to help spur adoption. I'll be writing a lot more about this in the future.
Virtualization. This was a common thread at several conferences, and the recent popularity of Parallels for browser testing barely scratches the surface. Virtual servers have a bunch of advantages over physical servers: you can clone them instantly, you can migrate them between machines (while they are still running if you're using Xen) and Amazon's EC2 offers utility computing on an enormous scale.
Dynamic languages on virtual machines. IronPython 1.0 is out, Sun have hired the JRuby guys. It looks like dynamic languages are finally being taken seriously as useful and powerful alternatives to C# and Java. Programmers on those VMs get more productive languages, while users of those languages gain access to enormous existing class libraries, not to mention the promise of significant performance boosts.

Finally, since I've blogged the last two releases of Python I can't resist saying a few things about the new Python 2.5. It's all good, but the stuff that really stands out is the addition of sqlite3, ElementTree and ctypes to the standard library. Batteries included!

Tags: barcamp, ctypes, dconstruct, dynamic-languages, eurofoo, eurooscon, ironpython, mediaintransition, openid, python, railsconfeurope, speaking, sqlite, virtuailization