BarCamp Boston 4 Wrap-up

BarCamp Boston 4 was the first BarCamp I’ve attended, and it certainly did not disappoint! I’d heard great things about it, and last year’s BarCamp-inspired Boston GameLoop set my expectations even higher.

What was great was that there were people with so many different technical and personal interests there. We had lots of people with computer science backgrounds (duh), but also many with electrical engineering backgrounds, as well as backgrounds in business and design. It made for a great environment where you never knew quite what you’d get, but there was always an interesting voice to hear from.

The informal nature of sessions is great, and all the good session leaders knew this: they always encouraged us to chime in and start the “real” conversation going throughout the room.

Session highlights

Here are some notes from a couple of the many stand-out sessions I attended.

Co-working

The co-working session was run by the two main guys who run Betahouse, a co-working facility in Central Square. They intended for the session to be a group discussion, but not surprisingly we all seemed to be most interested to hear about what co-working is like, how they maintain a good culture, and what lessons they learned.

Interestingly, several attendees were planning to start or were about to start up co-working facilities of their own, so it sounds like the co-working community is growing quickly (but hopefully not too quickly!) these days. I enjoyed the talk, and I think it gave everyone a lot of interest in co-working and confidence in its future in Boston.

Rails tools

 

 

I haven’t had the chance to check most of these out yet, but here were a few tools that people mentioned several times and/or raved about at the session:

• RubyMine (allegedly buggy in its pre-release state, but it’s now in 1.0, and it seems pretty neat to me, from my short use of it)
• rakeweb (testing via “faking web requests”)
• httparty (easy http, esp. good for consuming REST)
• auth_logic (auth)
• clearance (auth)
• ar_mailer (oldie but goodie?)

Here are some hosts that were recommended:

• heroku
• linode
• slicehost
• I’m still pretty happy with Dreamhost, especially since they now support Passenger

Stata Center

I think the Stata Center was a great venue for the event, and I’ll be happy to do it there again next year, if the organizers are for it. Its quirky is a great match for the BarCamp atmosphere.

Conclusion

BarCamp Boston 4 ruled: can’t wait for BCB5! Also, you can read what people tweeted about the event here.

 

 

[Photo credits: Steve Pomeroy and faz the persian, respectively. Post inspired by Matt Wiseley’s great Edit Your Web blog]