This Saturday I had the pleasure to attend Bar Camp Orlando. Its part of the Unconference Bar Camp series that is currently going around the world. We’ve attended BlogCamp Switzerland last year and it was a blast.
Below some of the more interesting talks, as with all free wheeling things, some stuff is cool and some stuff is just useless.
Natural Language Modeling
Mike Blake from apptrain.com talked about OO programming based on Natural Language. This is a topic that since the raise of Web Development has not have too much traction. Once could say the Web killed OO. His slides can be found here.
The new venture from PayPerPost, the self proclaimed most hated company on the Internet. Nevertheless they seem to have money to waste and are definitely moving fast. They have a bunch of new tools and sites online or in beta. One cool tool that stood out is a new buzz analyzing system for blogs. Based on the language they can detect if people are writing positive or negative about a product.
They are hiring too, but I guess I stick with Supertext for the time being 🙂
Built on the Amazon Cloud especially for Ruby, this platform enables you to scale out your Ruby application quick and painless. No need to buy expensive servers and you can scale up AND down.
Yet another open source Social Network built on Ruby. The guys didn’t really go into the differentiating factors to other Social Network, but the demo was cool and if you wanna build your own Social Network, this is worth a look. Besides, the guys seem down to earth and are willing to consult you for a fee.
The bigger discussion was about the login to their other little tool called More Honey. Instead of using OpenID, you can just login using your Google account. They then use the Google API to validate your credentials. I think this is a cool idea and maybe a better step towards Single Sign On than OpenID.
.NET Meetup
C# and ASP.NET was definitely under represented at the BarCamp, all the hype was Ruby and PHP. Not that everybody was all that happy with those too technologies either. But Microsoft is still not really the cool kid on the block.
Unit Testing is for weenies
Yes, unit testing is important, we all know it by now. And it apperently saves a lot of time. Unfortunately, all examples always cover the simple cases, you never really see how people test applications with lots of DB and user interactions. Nevertheless I will have a look at Selenium, which is a testing framework for Web Interfaces.
All in all it was a cool day, I met some nice new people and expanded my horizon a bit. It’s always good too see what the world outside of ASP.NET is doing.
I already signed up for the next Bar Camp:
iPhoneDevCamp in New York! Stay tuned for Supertext on the iPhone.