So, made it to another NYC tech event. On a Saturday no less. Anyway, this was the first BarCamp I’ve ever attended. I’ve been wanting to attend one for quite some time and was bummed to miss the big one a couple months ago. This however, made up for it because we covered one of my favorite topics: experience design. Oh wait, yeah, on the iPhone. So, even better.
Anytime I attend these smaller homegrown/grassroots events, I try to be one of the first there for a couple reasons:
1) Coming in from NJ and going somewhere different (like Brooklyn), it’s good to pad time. That’s obvious, but
2) There’s usually a ton of things that need setting up and that’s a great opportunity to pitch in and meet the lead volunteers before things get hectic.
oh and the refreshments are at their freshest. :-)
All the Smart Peeps
It was great to catch up with a couple folks such as Joshua Keay and his brother, Dave from Magnetism Studios and Chris Fahey from Behavior Design plus met a few new ones. These people are brilliant and lots of great discussions get going.
Tell ya what’s funny, though is organizing the day. It’s truly an organic process. During the meet and greet, everyone suggested the topics for the day. 
Then after introductions, we organized the topics into a schedule. There is nothing more hilarious than a hundred+ technology/experience professionals/enthusiasts creating what will ultimately be the “unconference” ad-hoc experience that are BarCamps.
There we were, deliberating over what order the topics should be in, which should run concurrently with what, who’s going to teach and miss out on a topic in another room. I was getting worried as I wanted to see UX and InterfaceBuilder in the beginning because I had to leave early. Then once we got it all figured out, we wound up starting all over again because… well, just because someone had to say something. Yeah, there was nothing planned up front!
But you know, something that could typically take event planners weeks to figure out, we did it in a matter of minutes. Experts surfaced, presentations were crafted on the fly, and the event was great.
Lunch
(We actually went on to the sessions first and then came back for lunch. Just wanted to group my topics.)
Good pizza; good discussions. Met some great folks and caught up with Patrick Ewing, brill rubyist working for Gary Vaynerchuk. Talked up some good ideas with him and Robert Marini who I just met for the first time. That guy’s smart. Look for good things to come from him. Also, got to meet Mac coder, Buzz Anderson creator of PodWorks and Cocoalicious. We got to chatter on general usability and development for the phone and some history growing up with the Mac. Ahh, the nostalgia…. Met wit one of the sponsors, Mike Sharon from socialight, about his move from South Africa to NYC and the cultural differences. So, it’s not all tech jabber, which is way cool.
Anyway, meeting people at these events is perhaps my favorite part (there were so many, I’m not going to be able to link to everyone, sorry!) There’s always either some new ideas or refinements to existing ideas that come out the cross-pollenization.
Read on the Sessions.
Don’t Miss
- Josh and Dave KeayMagnetism Studios
- Buzz Anderson sci•fi hi•fi
- BarCamp.org
- Mike Sharon
- Chris Fahey
- Dave Troy has some video on Qik.com
- Flickr Pics
- Rob Marini
Please, by all means add more local groups, events, blog posts, reviews, software downloads, help files, (whatever) in the comments and I’ll update.
Oh, and anything you post elsewhere, use the tag iPhoneDevCampNYC (especially if you twitter it, use a hashtag)
Technorati Tags:
iPhoneDevCampNYC,iPhone,barcamp, coworking