Digital Photography Session
uploaded by David Herrold

I attended the BarCamp Houston 3 on Saturday at the Houston Technology Center.

Most people assumed this meant I was going on some kind of pub crawl, but the term bar is actually a computer science term, and as such you should guess that this “unconference”, as it terms itself, has a high geek factor.

Anyone, who wants to present on a topic (and you are encouraged to do so) can have a 30 minute block of time. Everyone proclaims their intentions on a white board at the beginning of the day, and the lectures, panels, and discussions begin.

I enjoyed the following topics:

• Mobil (WAP) Best Practices (slides) – David – which included a lot of insightful statistics and experience from the chron.com
• Mobil Development: Web v Native – Nathan – some experiences from a small team delivering iPhone web apps
• Next Generation Biofuels: Global Markets and Trends – Will – a very interesting and informative talk – “algae”
• Lunch – catered BBQ, and an interesting 1:1 talk with Kenneth tying to get Python development onto the iPhone, and doing some interesting Python work off of the iPhone
• Financing Your Startup – Josh – was the most interesting thing available at the time – been there, don’t want to do that
• Tools for Virtual Teams – Wynn – an overview of free(ish) tools for collaborating over a distance
• Strategic PR with Social Media (slides) – Ed – nicely presented overview of public relations and how to involve social media in a company’s strategy
• Digital Photography and Social Media – Tracy – light and humorous overview of Flickr and how to get the most out of it
• Drupal Demo – Katherine – most useful was the overview of some of the design terminology, sites that use it: LinuxJournal.com, PopSugar.com, TheOnion.com

I was a little brain fried after that and took off.  I saw some people I’ve meet recently, met more new and interesting people, and I’m sure I missed meeting even more.

from my barely intelligible notes:

• Natuba – iPhone photo sharing, being developed in Houston
• Trac – for project management
• Git and GitHub – version control
• DropBox – consolidating your mail boxes
  
• BlogPulse.com – Nielsen for the blogosphere
• badging! – make it easy for customers to talk about you
• iamstillrich.com – mocking the IAmRich iPhone app
• PhoneGap.com – the most useful app at iPhone DevCamp II

Best exchange …

Me: I used to do NeXTStep Objective-C programming …

Kenneth: Really?! I was like, … three.