John Melesky

As many of you know, my current plans are to move to Portland, OR come August. I figured it would be a good idea to attend the local BarCamp.

There were some travel issues that prevented me from attending more than one day of the three-day get-together. Which was a shame, because the one day was pretty awesome.

From the perspective of someone meeting a new tech community, i have to say there may be some culture shock. Compared to Chicago, the BarCamp crowd was more age-diverse, more gender-diverse, and encompassed almost a half-dozen utilikilt-wearers. More astonishingly, everyone i met was friendly, even welcoming. And i felt my latent (and, frankly, mild) east-coastness made me almost unfriendly by comparison. Truly i’d entered bizarro-world.

From the perspective of a barcamper, it was a pretty fun conference. Most sessions fell into the traditional talk categories: look what i did, look at this neat thing, help me with this (technical/social) problem, let’s shoot the breeze about something, and potpourri. The specifics were a bit more broad than i’m used to, however. Andy Lester links to the flickr set of talk announcements while musing over moving and showing that he’s missed the last two local BarCamps.

Let’s see. In other news, my “Write your own Bayesian Classifier!” talk turned into a roundtable about text-mining and machine learning topics in general. CubeSpace made very gracious hosts, and i’ll happily rent space from them when i arrive. I still don’t understand Twitter or the local obsession with it. And, i’m not a werewolf.