Phew! What an awesome 23 hours! I’m just back from Barcamp Vancouver 2010 #bcv10. (Check out some pictures from the event). It’s been a while, since I have been this tired and excited at the same time. There are a thousand threads competing for the processor(s) in my head right now. I met a lot of very interesting people, and learnt about some great ideas. It has been a very educational weekend, in general. For all the great folks I met, I’m sure there were many more that I couldn’t chat with. To you, I say, “Let’s meet on the internets”.
A few great projects/ideas:
- Arduino - Open hardware platform for very building very cool things. A very inexpensive way to build your very own robot army.
- Plumtree Portfolios - Vancouver-based wedding photographer platform. This wasn’t a talk, but I wish it had been. A very interesting, clean product. Shawn Taylor is the founder, and he is getting geared up. This is has the potential to be huge, especially in Vancouver.
- HTML5 - a great talk by John Baxall, CEO @ Mobify. One of the best talks, and a great intro into the world of feature detection on browsers.
- OpenRestaurants - a vision to make restaurant websites suck less. Fingers crossed that this will happen sooner. We can all use better access to data (and not keep it behind walls .. I’m looking at you Facebook)
- FashionQuest - Text-only adventure game engine. Aahh this brought back some memories. A very interesting use of YAML (In my world, it’s used as modelling language for NETCONF)
- Freaking Eyes EyePong- Control an ipad app with your eyes (This stuff just blew my mind. Playing pong with just your eyes is incredible, not to mention the zillion possibilities)
- Symphony CMS - an XSLT based open source wiki. Another hallway demo. If you work for a large company, and your current CMS sucks, give this a looksie.
Some people that I got a chance to chat with. Friend ‘em up on twitter. Check out their projects/websites. It will widen your world, and will make you think.
- Stephen Bau: website, @bauhouse,
- John Boxall: website, @johnboxall
- Shawn Taylor: website, @stphotos
- Reilly ‘thejerk’ Lievers: website, @thejerk
- Cam Cavers: website, @camcavers
- Mike Cantelon: website, @mcantelon
- Craig Hennessey: personal, company
- Robin H. Johnson: website, @robbat2
Lastly, thanks to everyone who helped put up an wonderful event (and make my first one an incredible experience)
@RobertShaer, @AGladders, @NickMolnar, @DDrucker, @KK & @MattFriesen
The one thing I missed out on is meeting more designers. If you are in Vancouver, and want to meet for a chat on designing interfaces (which I suck at, with a vengeance), give me a shout @shiva.
Update: Found the video for eyePong.
The incredible cool hackers behind this are
_Jon Chui, __Tom Schultz __and Craig Hennessey (founder of mirametrix). _
Jon Chui has written about his experience in hacking eyePong. Check it out.