It’s the day after the second BarCamp in Copenhagen ever, and the first one that I’ve been lucky enough to participate in. Heck, I even presented at it, contributing with what you can is the whole point of such an arrangement, right?

BarCamp Copenhagen 2007
Copyright © 2008: Thomas Kristiansen

Here is some mixed impressions from night:

  • Meeting Henriette for the first time and realizing that her hair looks even more impressive IRL.
  • Geek talking about iPhone, RadiantCMS and other good stuff with fellow members of the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade.
  • Accusing MC of sounding like Martin Fowler when he asks insightful questions from the back of the room during presentations. His answer to these accusations is: “Who is Martin Fowler??”
  • Helping an ITU student realize that a nice no-so-geeky subject for her upcoming technical four-weeks assignment could be something about agile development.
  • Recommending Michael to go Thailand for his next business adventure, even though I have never been there myself.
  • Sneaking out and starting early on the very delicious buffet, consisting of plenty of small Mediterranean dishes.
  • Meeting for the first time a Turk - Tayfun - who is not trying to fit into the narrow-minded Danish society, but is simply an exchange student from DTU.
  • Discussing C# versus Ruby with Allan. Why is the first thing .NET guys ask always: “So, what IDE do you use for Ruby?” ??

My own presentation turned out to be only the second-most geeky of the night (MC’s on IPv6 being number one on that list), and I think it went pretty well. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but it was a bit of rip-off from Dr. Nic’s talk at RailsConf Europe 2007, although my attempts at being funny, while keeping up the proud tradition of ridiculing non-Ruby programming languages, was to compare PHP to a Chihuahua dog and C# to Uffe Holm.

It turned out, however, that my last slide was what generated the most response. It was nothing more than a screenshot of the heroku.com in-browser Ruby on Rails editor and recommendation of using this innovative service to get started with Rails. Perhaps I should do a full article about Heroku in the near future.

To those of you who were at BarCamp: Great meeting you! To those who weren’t there: Don’t miss out next year! And finally a big thanks to Henriette and Thomas for organizing the event, to Beaconware for hosting it, and not least: Thanks for the food and beers!