Why you should go to Beaver BarCamp 3
Beaver BarCamp is tomorrow in Corvallis and you should go to it! Why?
- Its completely free and open to EVERYONE
- Free food and drinks!
- You get a free T-Shirt (if you register)
- Cool and interesting topics & ideas will be discussed!
- Meet other cool people from the area
But what is a BarCamp exactly?
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event. -- barcamp.org
This is the third incarnation of Beaver BarCamp in Corvallis and is bound to be the largest thus far. Many people I have talked to have a hard time understanding what happens at a barcamp, and if its only for technical people. In the past, our barcamp has been tech focused, but that's been primarily because the outreach for the event has been mostly directed at OSU EECS students. Barcamp's are designed so that the people who attend also are the presenters. The more people who attend, the more variety you'll have at the event. You don't need to have a full-fledge presentation prepared, just an idea, a room (which we'll provide), and people to talk to!
How do you give a session? Make sure you get to Kelly Engineering at 10AM, put your presentation and name on a sticky note, pick a room & time and stick the wall. We'll adjust rooms based on the popularity of the session to ensure there is enough room. We have all of the meeting and classrooms available in Kelly essentially, so we shouldn't have any problems finding a room! Food and drinks will be provided for free thanks to the sponsorship of the OSEL for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We'll also have a snack break in the afternoon!
Some fun non-technical examples you could see at a BarCamp:
- How to kayake
- How to brew beer
- How to grow chickens in your backyard
Don't feel like giving a session yourself? That's OK! We won't pressure you at all. You can come and attend just one session to see what its like and don't need to spend all day there.
I plan on giving sessions about the following tomorrow:
- What is Calagator and why Corvallis needs it
- What's the next step for the Corvallis Social Tech scene?
- Ignite Corvallis brainstorm / roundtable discussion
I hope to see you there tomorrow!
Happy Holidays, ruby on rails, and … thunderstorms?
I've been spending the last week back home in northeast Kansas with my family for the holidays. I thankfully missed the snowpocalypse in Portland by ONEÂ DAY and had an uneventful flight to Kansas. If I would have decided to leave one day later, I probably would have been stuck in Oregon for another 2-3 days. Talk about being lucky!
Somehow IÂ didn't escape wacky weather totally. In the last four days, the temperature has gone from 15F to 45F to 67F to 27F. Only in Kansas will you have balmy weather one day and snow/ice the next (literally). Not to mention, I even got to experience a thunderstorm late last night! This type of weather never happens in Oregon so its nice to have some variety like this once in a while!
I've done a surprisingly good job of not doing any work related things while on vacation. The only things I've done have been taking care of a few minor issues and replied to a few tickets so that clients don't think we're totally ignoring them. I really needed this break so its been pretty refreshing.
The only tech related project I've been doing lately is getting familiar with calagator (an open source calendar aggregator used by the PDX tech community), and also even teaching myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR). I must be a nerd to use my downtime to teach myself something new like this.
I've always had this negative view on RoR mainly because of the past experience I've had and heard from other people. Setting up a server to run a rails app its quite different than something like php. Not to mention that there's a lot of wrong ways to run the application. I've always heard and even experienced performance issues with rails applications, but it seems to have changed in the last year or so.
I've had several great online chat conversations with Igal Koshevoy in the last few days talking about the various issues that Ruby and Rails has had over the last few years. It seems as though the RoR community has worked pretty hard to try and combat a lot of the bad PRÂ its had and fixed many of the technical faults it had. They've even gone so far as to fork the Ruby source into a project called Ruby Enterprise Edition. It includes some important performance fixes and other various improvements that benefit RoR applications. Overall, I'm fairly impressed with the design and simplicity of Rails for web applications. I can see the appeal for it from a development point of view. Now IÂ just need to play with the backend some more to find an ideal way to host it.
I'm heading to Kansas City and Topeka in the next few days to see some more friends. I haven't seen some of these friends in a few years so it'll be a nice finale to a great holiday vacation! I head back to Oregon next Tuesday and can't wait to get back to town. I actually miss the rain :)