BarCamp Tampa Bay 2011

We still live in Tampa so I didn't have to drive for 3.5 hours to get here, which was good. The Barcamp was held at KForce's HQ in historic Ybor city, just like last year. Nice facility for an event like this. I met up with Joe Nammour, a very good buddy of mine, who is a first-time camper and running a one-stop Drupal shop in Tampa. I know he had a good time.

Around 9 o'clock we gathered together and the biggest surprised was that Bob Buckhorn (YES, the mayor of Tampa) showed up and gave us a very uplifting message about how the city can grow with us and he will be helping us along the way. Thanks, Bob.

I also ran into Derek Bender who recently launched a new site called Impressto where creative people can buy, sell and share their work. Nice work as always.

so ...

9:00 - I sat in to see GazelleLab's presentation on mentor-ship and how important it is when you start a company. The internet was kinda sucky (wouldn't be a real Barcamp without it ;) so I couldn't show my new game I Know My Quotes. Well, maybe next time.

9:30 - I chose the SASS talk even though I already have a basic understanding of this technology, I wanted a little refresher and Matt Cowley delivered a high quality, entertaining "show" on SASS and Compass.

10:00 - Ryan Dorrel from AgileThought told us how he and he team built-up the company, how they put their employess first (yes, in front of clients most of the time) and how they've been voted to be the "best place to work" many times in various magazines. At this point I was pretty much ready to apply, but unfortunately they don't have a ping-pong table ... so that's a no then :)

10:30 - I was waiting for this presentation the most. A launch of a website is always exciting. We Are Tampa Bay.com will eventually collect local tech enthusiasts and companies into one place in a presentable manner. It runs on Ruby on Rails btw.

11:00 - I've been using git for about a year now, so I figured this presentation won't really have anything new to show, and fortunately I was mistaken. PRESENTER gave us a very nice overview why this source control will slowly but surely take over the world and walked us through how a git flow would work in "real life".

11:30 - I know Nick Petite from ThinkVitamin Membership (soon to be Treehouse) so I was absolutely sure this presentation will be high quality and it was. I know that Nick will show this presentation in the UK next week (month?) at a conf, I'll not go into details :) Let's just say he was talking about Responsive Web Design.

12:00 GOOD FOOD from Jimmy John's :) thanks for sponsoring ...

1:00 Right after lunch we gathered together with Ryan Price from Florida Creatives and ended with a somewhat heated argument over why there are NO talents in the Tampa area (hiding?) and why entrepreneurs have to go out of state or to India to get jobs done. It was interesting nonetheless.

2:00 Just as I mentioned the high quality of Nick Petite's talk, the same can be said about James Hopkins's Node.js and Socket IO presentation and it definitely gave us a little peek into the future. Who would've thought this 10 years ago about JavaScript, eh :)

2:30 So I promised my wife that I'll leave at 3 so at this point I just randomly picked a topic. As an application developer I don't really pay attention to SEO as much as I should (should I?) but this talk completely changed my view. I never really knew that blogging can change lives and make (this much) money unless you are a serious blogger with high profile contacts. And it's totally not true! 

The audience was wowed many times(!) by this dude, he didn't even have any slides or cool toys. He is using Wordpress to power all his (hundreds?) blogs where he talks about ... stuff. From Jersey Shore to Shoes, Fashion, Electronics etc. And that's all he does. Anyhow, keep an eye on this guy Ryan Magin.

My achievements that day

pat/touched Kevin Hale on the back (Wufoo)	started following Miss Destructo ... (on Twitter!)