MMMeeja

This is the second (and quite delayed) part of my write up of Barcamp Leeds 2008. It follows on from my previous post and covers the later part of Saturday afternoon and Sunday’s presentations.

Saturday Afternoon

I attended a talk on Business Networking for the Web 2.0 world, which unfortunately I found to be largely irrelevant. The round-table discussion descended into talking about talking and though I think that the leader had a strong case (i.e. that there should be a local interest group pitched between the geekiness of Barcamp and the business focus of Open Coffee), a lot more could have been acheived by just setting one up and inviting people.

Cloud Computing

Colin May gave an excellent introduction to cloud computing, with a high-level view of the options available. He argued, correctly, that academia has been using timesharing and grid computing for many years, and cloud computing is simply a repackaging of these concepts for the masses.

Colin covered the benefits and risks of relying on the cloud for essential services and concluded that none of the offerings were ready yet. This was quite controversial amongst the many sysadmins in the audience who made the point that relying on a single provider for any service leaves you at risk of outages.

Consensus was reached over the point that using the cloud is a decision to be made early on in the system design process and that developers and sysadmins must work together throughout the production process.

Colin finished off with a demonstration of Amazon’s EC2 service running an Ubuntu instance. This is something that I’ve been keen to play with for a while and his demo inspired me further.

That concluded my involvement with Saturday’s presentations and I retired to the pub.

Sunday

Sunday was an altogether more relaxed affair with an emphasis on fun. One of the highlights was presentation karaoke, where a speaker picks a random set of PowerPoint slides and makes up a presentation on the fly.

Website Performance

One of the more technical presentations on Sunday saw Tom from the Yahoo Developers Network present their YSlow tool. If you haven’t seen this tool before, I strongly suggest that you check it out.

Chatting with Tom and the other attendees revealed that websites are becoming much more like traditional software development, with debug builds and deployment scripts necessary for complex modern web applications.

TextMate

The last presentation of Sunday was Caius expounding on the joys of the TextMate editor for OS X. It is always useful to see how a power user leverages their tools and Caius certainly knew his way around the editor and its plugins.

Don’t think that I’ll be dumping vi any time soon though.

Thanks

I’d like to say thanks to the organisers and presenters for their hard work and to the other attendees whose willingness to learn and ask questions made the event thoroughly enjoyable. I’ll definitely be back!