Here the promised review of the third Barcamp Vienna which took place this weekend. A short summary: It was great.

The whole event took place in the office of Microsoft Austria - which was a really nice location! Many fully equiped meeting rooms for the sessions, and a nice cafeteria and courtyard with seating-accommodation for before-, between- and after-session talks.

Day 1

So what have I taken along with me from my second barcamp? Well, the first day started with a presentation of Mind42 I held (again), because nobody wanted the first presentation slot. I hope I was able to win some new users for the application but overall I think the application gets accepted very well. The rest of the day I joined the sessions about Microformats by Eric Eggert, about Accessibility (A11Y) by Martin Ladstätter & Robert Lender and a session about codecs and possibilities for video-streaming within the web-browser by Fabian Topfstedt (Flash) and Max Knor (Silverlight) which all have been done very good.

It was the first time that I’ve seen microformats in action - allthough I think that was not without reason ;). Nevertheless I’ve installed the Microformats Firefox plugin “Operator” afterwards. Also the A11Y session was very interesting and enlightening as I’ve never had something todo with this before, but I fear that this won’t have very much practical relevence for me in the near future. For example: One of the rules, so that screenreaders work is to use the markup what it was designed for. As I’m squeezing everything out of the browser possible to realize applications like Mind42 I ultimately break this rule.

The rest of the day I’ve spent to team up with Horst Gutmann to plan something like a Web-Framework afternoon for Sunday and to create the Dojo 0.9 Barcamp Blog example for my Dojo 0.9 presentation. In the evening I even got unexpected support for my Dojo 0.9 Session by Fabian Bartsch from Knallgrau. He spontaneously decided to enrich my planned Dojo only session with a section about EXT, another great JavaScript library.

Day 2

The second day feeled much more developer biased, in a positive way ;). In the morning I attended a discussion about different open source CMS systems (Tip: http://www.opensourcecms.com/) leaded by Michael Schuster as well as a short excursion about game development with Microsofts XNA Framework by Max Knor and Andreas Schabus. Well, game development still appeals me, but without time and a good idea this probably will never happen ;).

As mentioned on day 1, on Sunday afternoon we’ve started a Web-Development session marathon. I’ve kicked it off with Dojo 0.9, followed by Fabian Bartsch with EXT, followed by Horst with Django, followed by Max with Astoria (a REST-based database-access-layer) and finally finished by Fabian Topfstedt with a session about Grails. Very nice experience, but because of the feedback-round (whith mostly positive feedback - excellent organization!) and the slow end of the barcamp there sadly was no chance for Web-Development discussions after the sessions. Maybe next time

Overall a very good organized and nice barcamp with many interesting people. Thanks to Rolf Mistelbacher from Microsoft and the rest of the orga-team that made this event possible. At the end of my review I would like point to some nice photos of the event:

• 360° group photo by Christian Lendl
• Horst’s photos
• Flickr tag search

As mentioned in my previous post I attended the Barcamp Vienna 09.2007. It was a nice event and a resume-post will follow this evening. For now I just wanted to quickly post the slides and the downloadable example application of my Dojo 0.9 session yesterday. So here we go:

Slides: Download
Example Application: Download

After attending the Barcamp Vienna in June I’ve summed up that it was an re-visitable event. And so I’ve decided to visit the Barcamp Vienna September as well. It seems that this one will much bigger. By now already twice as many people have registered, and so it looks like nearly a hundred people will show up in the Microsoft office Vienna on Saturday and Sunday this week.

I’ve thought about what I could talk about, and since I didn’t want to present Mind42 in Vienna a second time I’ll prepare some slides and examples for a Dojo 0.9 session. Coordinated with the interest of the attendees I could talk about Dojo in general, about the differences between Dojo 0.4 and 0.9 or I could do a tutorial/example sessions, if a free time slot will be available at all :). We’ll see!

Altough I hadn’t planned to write too much personal stuff into this blog I think it’s time to report some things and to give an additional little summary about the Barcamp Vienna.

1. On Monday June 11th I successfully completed my studies by passing my diploma examination. For my diploma thesis I’ve researched and implemented a prototype for graphical modeling using JavaScript. The results of this work already can be seen at mind42.com
   By completing the educational part of my life (at least for now) I’m fully motivated looking forward into my bright and hopefully successful and glorious future.
2. To celebrate #1 I’ve took the last 10 days off. I didn’t work anything, I rarely used the computer (ok, that’s a lie :). I’ve got my new Mac Pro last week) and enjoyed my last vacations aka my first paid holidays.
3. Shame on me. Because of #1 and #2 which was exactly after the Barcamp I barely wrote about it. As already reported previously I held a session about mind42. Although only 1/4 of the people attended my session (the other 3/4 joined the Tag Your City session) I’ve got plenty of very constructive feedback. Also I had some interesting talks about mind42 and other stuff after my session which definitely makes the Barcamp a commendable revisit-able event.I’ve even seen that Hannes used mind42 to share his paper based mindmap from the flip chart in the web (1, 2). And also Heinz wrote in his blog Lost and Found about mind42 (The slides to my Webinale session he mentiond can be found here). I’m really happy with all the overwhelming and constructive feedback from the Barcamp or as comments in this blog and in the form of emails and so on…Unfortunately also because of #1 and #2 I already had to leave the Barcamp very early (going home learning and shivering of nerviness). Because of that and because of all the interesting talks, I really wasn’t able to attend very much of the other sessions. I watched the presentations and discussions about “High Tech Finanzierung” and “Medien, Telcos and Brands” but missed all the other stuff. It’s a pity, as I really wanted to get an insight into Processing (which I know have to do on my own) and waste some time with Shitter.Hope to see all the Barcampers again in September if the date doesn’t collide with my summer holidays.

So much for that - hopefully some more mind42 news in the near future

Just finished my software demo about mind42.com on the Barcamp Vienna (10.06.2007). Some Feature requests and fresh ideas for the project came in, but as I didn’t wrote them down the risk is high that I already forgot most of them

Check out the barcamp wiki to help me out remembering all the inputs! Go to the wiki.

First impressions: