[Eug-lug] beaverbarcamp trip report

[larry price]

This saturday I attended a daylong event known as BeaverBarCamp which
was a blast.

Highlights of the trip included:

* meeting Ward Cunningham, inventor of Wiki
  (the original WikiWiki is still at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki)
  Ward is working on http://www.aboutus.org/ these days, which is a
wikified company directory.

* learning about the Firefox Funnel Factor (retention rate) from Alex Polvi
   http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2007/11/02/firefox%E2%80%99s-funnel-factor/
   Alex also gave a short course in debugging memory leaks in Firefox.

* learning some new python idioms from Lars

* Meeting several people from Eugene who were completely unknown to me,
  including John Abbe of wagn.org which is a pretty snazzy mashup of
wiki/hypercard/semi-structured data

* talking with Shannon Dealy about his Mud Hut w/ DSL

* learning about the nickle programming language from one of it's
authors http://nickle.org/name.html

* presenting at the 5-minute demo session being wowed by some of the
other presenters
  (http://ridewithgps.com was the coolest, but they were all good)'

* Being exposed to the Ignite format http://ignite.oreilly.com/
   (you get 5 minutes and 20 slides @1 per 15 seconds; what would you
talk about?)
   which was fun, and focused, I think an ignite style event would be
real fun and fairly straightforward to organize.

A number of regulars on this list made it to this event. And in my
opinion it was well worth the effort.