Derek Gallo

Its going to be a busy week because the following day, Saturday the 5th of April starts the second BarcampOrlando. The first day is geared towards developers and the second towards media. Don’t miss the official after party GeekOut ‘08! It should be a great day of learning and meeting fellow geeks in Orlando. I will be meeting Gregg early on dev day to help pickup the chairs for the event. If you would like to help unload or setup other aspects please come by.

Last, I would like to mention another geek meetup I along with some help from others am trying to revive/startup. OrlandoPHP will be a monthly meetup to discuss and learn everything PHP. If you dabble in PHP development or are interested in picking up more knowledge, stop on by! Our first meeting is scheduled for April 22nd at Devry from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. We are currently planning on reviewing the the available frameworks for php and discussing their pros and cons. If you have any questions or want to help get this going contact me.

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.