Barcamp wrap-up —
Barcamp‘s over now, and was well worthwhile. I’ve missed the kind of environment where you can wander up to people, say “So, what are you working on?” and get an enthusiastic insight into an area you might not know anything about — Barcamp’s everyone-should-participate mentality was just right for that.
The Touchstream turned out to be a big conversation starter, and I had fun chatting about alternative keyboards and UIs with smart and friendly people like j and Steve. I gave my first Dasher demos since leaving Cambridge, which felt good; reminding me how worthwhile a project it is, and that it deserves more of my time than I’ve given it.
My talk at Barcamp was 20 Perl modules in 30 minutes. After the talk we chatted about possible reasons for Perl being suspiciously absent from the rest of the talks, with people finally seeming to lean towards Ruby/Python/PHP instead. I’ve been hanging on to Perl partly because I’m paid to write it, and partly because of the mind-blowing awesomeness of the CPAN. When Ruby gets a module collection with anywhere near as much coverage, I’ll be there.
The reddit guys came up with a hilarious talk on Web 2.0, and are going to upload the video of it to this page sometime soon.
Also: I was thrilled that someone came up after my talk and said he uses a Mac and wondered where I got the software to do cube flipping between two workspaces — I was swapping between one workspace containing my presentation and one with an emacs session showing example code and running it. The reason I was thrilled is that I wasn’t using a Mac, but we must be doing something right if my setup can be mistaken for one! I used Linux with magicpoint for the presentation and compiz on aiglx for the crazy cool cube flipping.