I went to Barcamp Brussels yesterday .. I arrived way to late.. around 1430 the parking lot was already closed and I had to find a parking place and the place itselve while the sky was pouring down on me.
So when I finally enterred the building all the T-Shirts were already gone :( So apart from the pictures people took.. I can't prove I was there..
A quick look at the schedule learned me that I first wanted to go see the iText , iText being used by Google and others , is a neat PDF library written by Bruno Lowagie , Bruno is even working on a book about the topic, in that book he uses an imaginary university at an imaginary city FooBar to build examples. The fact that he isn't publishing it with O'Reilly probably makes it the most relevant talk at Barcamp :)) Which made me wonder how many people at Barcamp Brussels actually knew where the name Barcamp came from .. and suprisingly noone I asked really knew... weird :)
So 2 minutes into Bruno's talk I started wondering why the talk was in dutch.. and it seemed that actually everybody in the audience was a native dutch speaker.. even weirder.. something I`m definitely not used to..
Frank Louwers actually was prepared to give his Hosting 2.0 in either dutch or english as he had prepared 2 sets of slides .. His talk was about or what changed in hosting and what we expect from a hosting company. I talked with Frank later on his visions of clustering , virtualisation and system management, and off course topics such as Xen and OpenQRM came up :)
The next talk I joined was the one from Bart Van Herreweghe about Taggingmanager , as an happy del.ico.us user I was interrested in what tagging manager was all about. I was dissapointed that my question on what was wrong with the existing opensource implementations such as
delirious wasn't really answered. My interrested was in where the delirous implementation lacked features and functions, or failed to be integrated with other platforms, isn't maintained anymore or whatever .. . I'm still not sure so I`ll have to look into both projects as I plan on integrating some kind of bookmark/tag sharing in our corporate intranet.
With my old demoscene background I really enjoyed the talk about workspace unlimited I really plan on visiting their setup in de Vooruit in Gent in september ..
Barcamp Brussels was Small , and fine which meant you actually got the chance to talk to a lot of people and still see the talks as it wasn't too crowded... compared to Fosdem when upon entering the building it takes me about an hour to arrive at the first talk as I spend way to much time talking to different people and not going to talks. This time I actually got around talking to people that I haven't been talking to for ages :)
Maybe my expectations on what kind of people / talks to meet and see there were a bit wrong.. when looking at other barcamps where people such as whurley and Moshe were present, I was maybe hoping for a bit more of system level innovation etc. or at least more technology innovation rather than Bloggers meet and talk about Blogging tools. I wasn't sure on what I should talk about as most of the topics I usually speak about would have been so out of scope and probably wouldn't have reached any potientiel audience. Well.. maybe my Everything is A Funky DNS problem talk would have suited but still ..
Next Barcamp Brussels is planned for somewhere in crowdy september (Euroscon, LinuxKongress etc..) and I`ll try making up for the lack of talk by giving either my Everythying is a talk ... or a Sysadmin 2.1 talk :)
