Derek Gallo

The first barCamp Orlando was great. All of the people who spoke prepared good presentations and all of them gave something to learn. I even picked up some good information from the topics I was already familiar with. Many thanks to Gregg and Jason and everyone else who helped as well as all of the presenters.

I was originally hoping most of the presentations would be more code based examples of programming techniques, but I am glad they were higher level as I am sure that would have become pretty boring after a couple presentations. Next year I hope to have a presentation of my own. I thought about presenting something this year, but everything I thought of presenting on I kinda just figured with all the geeks in the audience they would already know it. After seeing the variety of presentations this year, I am sure I can find something to present on next year.

Some of the presentations I particularly enjoyed:

Designing Apps for the iPhone

(mostly because I just bought one and I am ready to start writing apps for it)

Staying on Track (Project Management) by Robert Dempsey.

Project Management has always been a strong topic for me. While I don’t particularly enjoy it, doing it correctly can decrease my headaches and let me do what I love more effectively, development. Robert’s presentation pointed out many great points, some of which we pretty much know and a couple of other good tips. I hope to see a presentation next year on applying the principles. Many of us “know” what goes into it, but effectively executing on those principles is usually the deciding factor.

Why Ruby on Rails by Gregg Pollack

I am not a RoR activist and I have never even written an application in Ruby. I have always been skeptical of it because of all of the scaling problem rumors and the fact that there is sort of an elitist attitude among many RoR developers, kinda like Mac enthusiasts vs. Windows. I have eventually made the switch to Mac also but I like to make informed decisions on what to use instead of just following the herd and I can say that Mac is pretty good but using it doesn’t necessarily make you better at everything.


Gregg’s presentation was good though and showed some real reasons for considering RoR. We already use a custom MVC php framework but I want to really do a couple of RoR projects to try it out. At the very least I picked up a couple of ideas to possibly include on our own framework.

I really look forward to next year. I am sure we can double the attendance so we will need a bigger venue for sure. Oh, and let’s do it on a Sat. so we can watch football on Sun.

BarCampOrlando is coming in a couple of months. Myself and some of the guys from NFi will be attending. The BarCamp guys have released an informational video and button to promote the event.

Get the code to post yourself and help spread the word:

Cory, Chris and I attended the monthly Likeminds Orlando meetup for July. Overall it went well, although we couldn’t stay the whole time. Damn those work from home guys not having to be into the office at 9:00am. Topics ranged from college stories to industry news to even hunting. There were some cool new faces and returning visitors as well. Its always great to get out and meet others in the community and I am looking forward to next month. Thanks to Alex for organizing the event. Maybe next month we can switch up the location to a Starbucks? I like their coffee better hehe. Also, if anyone has a contact list of everyone at the meetup I would much appreciate it.