Barcamp Atlanta 2008

I’ve been pretty lazy about posting. The result is that Barcamp Atlanta 2 has come and gone since mentioning it 1.5 months ago in my last post. It was again a lot of fun and I had a blast catching up with friends, learning about all sorts of things (Erlang, Fluid, liguid nitrogen, distributed version control details being some favorites) and getting to discuss startups, entrepreneurship and other topics I enjoy with people I respect both in the sessions and in the time between - even got to play a little 2am Guitar Hero. I certainly appreciate all Michael Mealling, the sponsors, and everyone else involved did to make it happen. It made for a great weekend, went off without any issues (as far as I could tell) and anyone who skipped definitely missed out. I enjoyed it more than last year both due to the content/event and due to my company being in a far more stable state and not having to worry about the following week and fight nasty bugs all night like last time.

It is the people that attend that make it worthwhile, its amazing how 100+ smart, interesting people just show up, setup sessions, and start learning/sharing/drinking/coding. Some other factors that contributed to the success:

• ATDC. The location for Barcamp is pretty much perfect. The layout of that floor is absolutely ideal for what Barcamp is and it truly is great for ATDC to loan out that space for a weekend. They even had extra security there all night which was a good idea considering the density of Macbooks, phones, etc there.
• The layout of the center room with the round tables was fantastic and far more conducive to conversation than the rows of chairs last year. I would strongly vote for having this layout again next time. It also made that center room work for smaller round-table discussion sessions as well.
• I think having the first night dinner inside (in the room with round tables) worked out really well. Last year at the top of the deck it was windy, there weren’t places to sit, and it was hard to talk to people.
• All of the other sponsors - wow there was a lot of food, soda, and beer. BBQ for dinner, Flying Biscuit for Saturday breakfast, and great pizza for lunch and the food-to-person ratio was huge at each.

The only negative is I leave with a dozen things I want to look into with more detail. I especially want to start playing with Erlang now but must wait as I feel that I need to build up more Ruby knowledge before Startup Weekend 2. By the way, there was a session at Barcamp on Startup Weekend 2 and its a bit different than last year but sounds like it will be a lot of fun.