This past Saturday, November 14th, a hundred DC tech enthusiasts gathered at the Martin Luther King Library to create their own conference. Topics were suggested by participants and the group at large determined the schedule. It was a BarCamp at it’s best!

This year’s BarCamp had a few twists. The word ‘Twitter’ was banned and anyone violating that rule had to pay a dollar to the Twitter swear jar which was donated to charity. The other rule was no PowerPoint slides which was an effort to promote group discussions and participation over lectures.

I got to catch up with former co-workers from USNews as well as other DC tech-heads I met at other local events. The entire event including lunch was free of charge thanks to the generous sponsors who helped make BarCampDC possible. The pizza was quite good.

Some of the talks I went to included:

How To Play Tetris led by John Chen. John didn’t actually think anyone was interested in his talk but we had a good-size group talking about video game politics, strategies for Tetris, and the fact that there are Tetris pros making US$100k per year in Korea. The key takeaway was being good at Tetris takes practice, practice, and more practice. And after you’ve practiced some more, you wake up one day and realize you’re good at Tetris.

An Introduction to the Android Platform Gyuri Grell and Zvi Band led an introduction to the Android mobile OS platform. The talk was a little over my head as it was mostly about Java, which I know nothing about. The source code for Meetro DC, the DC Metro app demoed, can be found on GitHub for anyone to poke around and play with. I did enjoy seeing from a high level how Android apps work and shedding some light on the magic running behind the scenes. I’m really excited to see where Android goes in the future.

The most thought-provoking talk I sat in was Generalist vs. Specialist led by Kelly Gifford. It was such an open-ended topic that spurred a healthy debate. From my point of view you are both a generalist and specialist depending on what level you are comparing to. For example, in your company you might be the only “web person”, making you a specialist but with so many different hats to wear in a sole-developer position, you have to do many different things making you a generalist. Like most anything in life, nothing is cut and dry black and white but a lot of gray areas.

Ryan McGrath is in a unique situation at his job at Webs.com.  He is in charge of Improving the Performance of the Frontend for millions of sites hosted there.  Crufty code, too much JavaScript, and a less-than-ideal backend issue are some of the problems plaguing his pursuit for excellence. An engineer from Clearspring, which distributes billions of page views of widgets all across the web,  was in the room and provided some great insight into tuning performance for large-scale sites. They talked about some geeky stuff like serving images as base64 strings instead of binary data which can yield some performance gains. I was pretty much lost after that.

The final talk of the day was about TemlarPHP, a cascading template framework built with PHP. It separates presentation from content to create websites that are easy to maintain and standards complaint with the need for a database. It was created by Shawn Brown and looked like a lighter alternative compared to the other feature-packed, and somewhat bloated, web frameworks out there.

Like the past two DC BarCamps, I gave a talk. The topic was HTML/CSS/JavaScript Tips & Tricks which I have picked up over the past few years and thought were worth sharing. I felt it was one of my best presentations as my talking points came to me naturally with code details to back up what I was saying. I was stoked to see so many people show up to hear what I had to say as well as contribute a few points of their own. Shaun Farrell managed to capture video from a part of my talk.

So as you can see there was a lot going on. There were so many other presentations I wanted to see and people I wanted to meet and chat with but there just wasn’t enough time. A big thanks goes out to the organizers (@jfc3 , @thorpus, @corbett3000, @farrelley, @patricktimony & all the others) that helped put on another great DC tech event.

Other BarCamp DC Resources

• #barcampdc on Twitter
• BarCamp DC photos on Flickr
• Recap by Jimmy Gardner (who took a lot of really good photos too)
• Vincent Gallegos: Photos and Notes (props to Vincent as most of the photos in my post are from him)
• Highlights from the ButtonAll Blog
• List of BarCamp DC attendees on Twitter
• The finalized schedule

Today was a long but enjoyable day at TEDxMidAtlantic. It’s refreshing seeing so many different perspectives and open minds converge on a single stage at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Perhaps even more mind blowing is videos from every talk are already online for anyone to view. Here are 5 of my favorite, must-see TEDxMidAtlantic talks from today (sorry no direct links yet, you’ll have to scroll through and find their names):

1. Will Noel – Talked about restoring a book from Archimedes and sharing it with the world under a Creative Commons license.
2. Scott Simon – Talked about his most memorable story that he covered in Sarajevo in the 1990s.
3. Peter Agre – Story about his career in science and winning the Nobel Prize in 2003. Very funny guy.
4. Tony Geraci – Talked about how he transformed school lunches in Baltimore City Public Schools.
5. Marcus Ranum – Talked about how everyone on the Internet is using TCP/IP and how upgrading the whole planet earth would be hard to do.

A big thanks goes out to the hundreds of volunteers who made this event even possible. Here’s a picture from @sengseng of their standing ovation.

Other coverage of TEDxMidAtlantic:

• Liveblogging from InsideCharmCity.com
• Writeup in Baltimore Business Journal
• List of attendees on Twitter
• #tedxmid hashtag on Twitter
• TEDxMidAtlantic photos on Flickr
• The Stage at TEDxMidAtlantic

Accessibility Camp really opened my eyes to how people with disabilities experience the web. The Martin Luther King Library in downtown DC was the perfect venue for this barcamp style event. The adaptive services department has all sorts of assistive technology that anyone can use and learn more about.

I met a lot of diverse people like Patrick Timony (Adaptive Technology Librarian at MLK library), Jennison Asuncion (IT Accessibility Consultant from Toronto), Jamal Mazrui (a visually impaired software developer) and about 100 others who were passionate about sharing what they know to make the web a better, and more accessible, place. Here are some of my take aways.

Carolyn Kelley Klinger talked about making PDFs more accessible (PDF) by structuring documents with headers (using Headline 1, Headline 2 etc. styles instead of making the text bold and bumping up the font), adding column/row headers for data tables, supplying alternative text to describe images, and making sure anyone links are within context (no “Click Here” or “Read More” links). I was surprised at how similar preparing an accessible PDF is to preparing an accessible website.

Jamal Mazrui wants to build web apps to benefit disabled netizens. He’s afraid that as broadband speeds increase over the next few years we will see an influx of visually oriented interfaces with no accessibility in mind. The same thing happened in the mid 90′s with the move from an entirely text based DOS operating system, to a graphical interface driven OS like Windows. Today, emerging technologies like Adobe Air, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Google Wave, Google Android, Second Life, and the Amazon Kindle have little to help handicapped users. Apple’s iPhone is fairly good when it comes to accessibility as evident by all the people who had one at Accessibility Camp. Hopefully the tech industry will learn from its prior mistake of ignoring the needs of handicapped users.

For lunch everyone got as many Potbelly sandwiches as they could fit in their bellies. Thanks to the generous sponsors who made the event not only possible, but free for everyone we were able to enjoy a scrumptious meal.

After lunch I got to see a live demonstration of Jennison using the screen reading application, JAWS, to navigate the web. Holy Cow! I can’t believe how different the web is when you can’t see where you’re browsing. It takes a while for a visually impaired user to get acquainted with a new website since every site has a different set of pitfalls. The source-order of your website, that is the order of your content with no styles applied, makes a huge difference to the experience of a blind user. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to user test your project, make sure to get feedback from a visually impaired person using a screen reader too.

Other events that were going on throughout the day included Practical Ways to make Your Site More Accessible, Making Mapping More Accessible, eLearning Tools, and Online Gaming for Persons with Disabilities. It seems like everyone there had something to share.

A big thank you goes out to John Croston and Patrick Timony for organizing, the staff at the MLK library for providing an awesome venue, all of the sponsors who made the event even possible, and everyone who attended with something to share. This event really opened my eyes to accessibility and the web.

Other Accessibility Camp DC links:

• List of slides/blog write ups
• #AccessCampDC on Twitter

Next up is Bar Camp DC 3 on November 14th.

The DC tech scene is just bursting at the seams with interesting (and free) tech events and un-conferences coming up this fall. I don’t know If I will be able to attend them all but here are a few that made it on to my radar.

Accessibility Camp DC is taking place at Martin Luther King Library on October 10, 2009. The event will cover topics and discussions about making the web more accessible.

• E-mail – info@AccessibilityCampDC.org
• Twitter – @AccessCampDC
• Cell – 703-587-2458
• Wiki – http://barcamp.org/AccessibilityCampDC

PublicMediaCamp will be at American University on October 17 and 18, 2009. The event aims to put 100 developers, 100 public media supporters, and 100 people who work for public broadcasting companies in a room and see what comes of it.

• RSS Feed – http://publicmediacamp.org/feed/
• Wiki – http://wiki.publicmediacamp.org/
• Twitter – @PublicMediaCamp
• Hashtag – #pubcamp

TED^x Midatlantic will be held on November 5, 2009, at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD.  The event will feature presentations by many of the leading thinkers and doers in the MidAtlantic Region.

• E-mail – tedxmidcontact@gmail.com
• Twitter – @TedXMidatlantic
• Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=112275396087&ref=nf

BarCamp3 is the grand daddy of all DC tech events. It will be at the Martin Luther King Library on November 14, 2009. This is always my favorite event of the year.

• Twitter – @barcampdc
• Highlights from BarCamp & BarCamp2

A group of technopreneurs made it out to the University of Maryland campus for Bootstrap Maryland.The aim of the conference is to teach budding entrepreneurs “the necessary tools for running a lean and successful technology business.” The event had 4 main panels covering a variety of topics from marketing and public relations to picking the right technology. I learned a lot from the anecdotes of the local entrepreneur panelists. While I ‘m more HTML than MBA, the event inspired me to keep thinking about the business angle on the projects I take on.

Panelists of the third session at Bootstrap Maryland

Since every seat in the business school lecture hall had a power plug and the WiFi was strong throughout the entire event, I managed to take a copious amount of notes on my wiki. Here are some of the highlights:

• When it comes to a business plan, do you need one? Whole panel answers “Meehh… not really.”
• Recessions are a great time to start a business because everything is cheaper and there is a ton of talent available.
• Businesses don’t fail because of the technology, businesses fail because they don’t understand their market.
• How to better understand your market: Experiment, Evaluate, adapt.
• MYTH: Experience in the corporate world translates to the start-up world. The start up world is a totally different beast.
• Want to get rich quickly? Rob a bank. Sell crack. Don’t start a company.
• Best brand right now is “swine flu”, “susan boyle”
• If considering outsourcing, go with a brand name firm.
• Don’t under-estimate the value of play.
• The MD/DC/VA area has tons of groups and events

That last point is big. If you are looking for a local group of people who are interested in media/technology/business, the DC metropolitan area has something for you. After all, where else would 200 people get together to share ideas and stories about starting businesses on the cheap on a Saturday. Jared Goralnick did a great job organizing everything and I would expect the attendance to double for the next one.

Jared Goralnick polls the audience of Bootstrap MD

Drinking a Diet Coke with pizza and salad for lunch.

Genius Rocket (lunch sponsor) distributes fliers while everyone is out in the hallway eating pizza.

Panelists mingle with the audience after the 2nd session at Bootstrap MD

More of my photos from Bootstrap MD: Picasa / Flickr / Facebook

Other coverage of Bootstrap MD:

• 20 Take-aways From Bootstrap MD
• #bootstrapmd Tag on Twitter
• Photos Tagged bootstrapmd on Flickr

This past weekend the second DC area BarCamp took place. Like last year’s event, a horde of local techies came out to teach one another and collaborate on new ideas.

My favorite presentation was from Jeff Brown, a high school teacher who considers himself a webucator. His talk was about how he is teaching proper, standards-compliant web development techniques at Damascus High School in Montgomery County. Here’s a picture of the back of my head (I’m in the blue shirt) taken by kenyaoa during the session.

Another memorable event was an impromptu session about Expression Engine, a flexible CMS. I was so inspired from the small group that the next day I tried the free version out myself.

The Washington Post was there covering the event and there was a small write up in the business section this morning. They interviewed Charlie Park, a friend of mine I met at the first BarCamp, who started an online budgeting app. The reporter called the space where we were meeting a “Georgetown basement” but it was actually generously donated by the Center for Digital Imaging Arts, which is a part of Boston University.

When you get over a hundred developers together all day, they’re going to get hungry. Thankfully this Barcamp was loaded with food. A full breakfast was provided including an assortment of bagels, muffins, and coffee. Candy, nutrigrain bars, and granola bars were available for snacking on throughout the day. And for lunch, the organizers ordered 100 pizzas for everyone! I think that ended up to be half a pizza for every attendee. As you might guess there was some extra food leftover at the end of the day so the Barcamp organizers donated 40 pizzas, 60 bagels, and a heap of muffins to a local homeless shelter.

The after party took place at McFadden’s and since there was extra money left over in the budget we got to blow it on free drinks and food. Our waitress did a great job of keeping the group’s glasses and bellies full.

Overall it was another great DC tech event. A big thanks to all the people who helped organize the event and deal with the logistics. Another big thanks goes to all the sponsors who made BarCamp possible. Their donations went a long way so everyone could have a great time.

Other posts from around the interwebs:

• Diditz – BarCamp DC 2 Wrap up
• Taylor Davidson – BarCampDC2: Exploring Ideas
• Zvi Band – BarcampDC2 Was Awesome
• Tony Primerano – Good Times at BarCampDC2
• Photos tagged ‘barcampdc2′ on Flickr

It seems like just yesterday I was telling you guys about SocialDevCamp East. But the other day I got word that the 2nd DC area BarCamp is happening on Saturday, October 18th. This time it will be at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University in Georgetown. Why there is a Boston University in DC is beyond me. But lucky for me, the conference is right across the street from my work so I’ll be familiar with the area.

Last year’s BarCamp was the first technology conference I had ever been to and I had a great time meeting other like-minded web folks like myself. I gave a presentation about Firebug which was pretty much by the seat of my pants. This time I hope to present again except this time around I will come better prepared.

I hope to see you there on October 18th for BarCamp DC 2! More details can be found at the official website and wiki.

Location:

Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University
1055 Thomas Jefferson Street NW
Washington, DC 20007

Today was the first day of the 2nd annual Techcrunch 50 conference. The goal of the conference, dreamed up by entrepreneurs Micahel Arrington and Jason Calacanis, was to promote 50 great start-ups to the “industry’s most influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press.” They also hoped to eliminate the fee for start-ups to present like other conferences.

Today they announced the 50 finalists where a few companies caught my eye right off the bat.

Fitbit wants to make living a healthy lifestyle easier. The company is developing an “ultra-compact” wearable sensor that transmits various data (like calories burned, quality of sleep, number of steps, and distance) to it’s website for analysis. The wearer can track data and mark their progress as they strive to reach personal goals.

This product resonates with me. I’ve been trying to keep track of my health, like what I eat and how much I weigh, but it becomes tedious. A small, compact device that can do a lot of the tedious recording for me is certainly welcome.

Yammer is like Twitter for companies. Instead of answering “What are you doing?” Yammer wants you to answer “What are you working on?” The service is more secure than public micro-blogging services because you can only join a network if you have an approved e-mail domain. The hope is Yammer will be a central repository which can archived and searched will make everyone more productive.

I would find something like this useful to keep tabs on what projects my co-workers were working on without being a nosy micro-manager. The problem is older people don’t really get Twitter so it would be a tough sell to get everyone on bored. Younger works already update what they’re doing on Twitter and other micro-blogging services albeit a little more obscure.

Out of all the websites of the Techcrunch 50 finalists that I visited, Popego looked the best. The service sounds vague according to the Techcrunch description: “Surfaces the most meaningful information from within your social graph based on your interests and other factors.”

Blah Girls probably had the biggest buzz of the bunch because it is being pitched by Ashton Kutcher. The premise is “a gossip site that features a group of animated teenage girls who provide opinions on what’s going on in the world of entertainment.” I’m curious to see an episode or two to see if it is worthy of joining my video podcast playlist.

Finally, the biggest WTF award goes to Shryk. How is their name pronounced? Shrike? Shreik? I have no idea. The goal of the company is something I can get behind however. They hope to promote financial literacy and good saving habits among teens/tweens with web based software built specifically for that age group.

There are many more companies I didn’t have a chance to get to either for lack of time or because the company just sounded flat out stupid. Like PlaYce, which aims to go head-to-head with the often misunderstood Google Lively. Browser based virtual worlds seem like such a losing proposition.

It will be interesting to see who the Techcrunch50 judges pick as the most interesting startup of the conference.

Crunchbase links for the start-ups mentioned:

• Fitbit
• Yammer
• Popego
• Blah Girls
• Shryk
• PlaYce

I just got an e-mail today from Dave Troy, the SocialDevCamp East organizer, announcing the fall edition of SocialDevCamp East! Like last year, this unconference is taking place at the University of Baltimore’s Thumel Business Center Building. If it is anything like the first SocialDevCamp East then expect to meet lots of interesting people and sit in on a bunch of great talks.

So if I’ve piqued your interest and you’re free all day on Saturday November 1st, then I’ll see you there! If anyone from the DC area wants to go and needs a ride up to Baltimore then let me know. I’ve got a mini-van and live right next to the Glenmont metro station (red line).

Time and Place

Date:

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Time:

8:30am – 10:00pm

Location:

University of Baltimore

Street:

1420 Charles St.

City/Town:

Baltimore, MD

View Map

Other Resources

• Official SocialDevCamp East Wiki
• Facebook Event Page
• Follow ‘socialdevcamp’ on Twitter
• Linkedin Group

Picking session topics at SocialDevCamp East

The DC area is exploding with meetups and unconferences. First it was BarCamp DC in August, then PodCampDC at the end of April, and just this past weekend was SocialDevCamp East which took place in Baltimore. The latest unconference had an emphasis on the future of the web and many of the sessions were theory-heavy about topics that are the very bleeding edge of the next-generation Internet.

Mike Subelsky talked about Amazon’s EC2 web service.

The first session I went to was about Amazon’s web services specifically the EC2 service. The discussion, which was led by Mike Subelsky, revealed the possibilities for new products and services thanks to Amazon taking a lot of the cost and hassle of running server hardware out of the equation with their on-demand virtual server solution. System administration is foreign to me but I could see the benefit of Amazon’s web services.

Dr. Harry Chen discusses the Semantic web.

The Social Media and Semantic Web panel was a real thinker. This was the first time really diving into the nitty-gritty of the Semantic web, which will make the future Internet smarter and easier to manage with data being in a well structured, meaningful format. Dr. Harry Chen led the discussion (see his slides) with some valuable contributions from the crowd about where this web trend was heading. This gave me ideas about how U.S.News & World Report could add Semantic data to it’s upcoming data projects.

Bear, from Seesmic, adding to the Semantic web discussion.

Lunch was provided at SocialDevCamp East and consisted of a make-your-own sandwich buffet. It was probably one of the best spreads at any unconference I’ve been to. During lunch I chatted with Patti, the founder of a Baltimore area start-up called 600block.com. The site aims to help you and your friends find interesting local things, starting with Baltimore and eventually branching out to other areas. I also met Bear who is an infrastructure developer at Seesmic. He mentioned Seesmic is embracing the Semantic web by building FOAF and SPARQL into their API’s. They hope to make everything they can as open as possible which is really encouraging for the future of web video communication. He also gave me a Seesmic t-shirt. Nice!

Shashi knows the benefit of social media to companies.

After lunch I went to see what Shashi Bellamkonda from Network Solutions had to say about Selling the Value of Social Web to Management. Shashi is a very web social guy who I first met at PodCampDC. He cited how lots of companies are opening up direct communications with customers like Comcast with their ComcastCares twitter account. His main point was blogs/Facebook/Twitter are not another marketing avenue for companies to fill, but rather a way to expose the personality behind the company.

The final session was an intimate discussion about the popular JavaScript libraries that are out there. In attendance was Amy Hoy who is engaged to Thomas Fuchs the creator of script.aculo.us. Clearly she had a bias to Prototype but everyone else seemed to be into jQuery.

I had to duck out after the actual conference part was over so I missed the after party. I met a lot of interesting people who share the same passion for technology as me. Each time I go to one of these unconferences I come out with a bunch of ideas and new perspectives. I can’t wait until the next one which will probably be BarCampDC 2 sometime in the summer. And if you missed this one don’t fret as their are plans for another SocialDevCamp East in the fall.

Other SocialDevCamp East Recaps:

• Dave Troy
• Keith Casey
• Shashi Bellamkonda
• Mike Subelsky
• East Cost Blogging
• Flickr Photos