Camping the Bar

Today I had the pleasure of attending the third annual BarCamp Charleston. Being an unconference, the attendees at BarCamp are also the presenters, with sessions allocated to presenters based upon voting by the attendees at a pitch-and-vote session at the start of the day.

This year was my first time presenting, and although my presentation on “Responsive Web Development” was a bit on the short side (slides are available on SpeakerDeck), it was an all-around enjoyable experience. Hopefully we’ll have done enough even more cool stuff at Madelike to make for a more in-depth and involved presentation next year. Beyond my own contribution, the conference was, as usual, awesome. Adrian and the rest of the organizers did an excellent job keeping things running smoothly1. The sessions I attended—ranging from customer support to an overview of responsive, semantic mobile design to a presentation of a library for dealing with conflicts in eventually-consistent systems2—were all incredible, and my sincerest thanks go out to all the organizers, attendees/presenters, and sponsors who helped make BarCamp Charleston so great this year.

Unfortunately/fortunately I will be hitting the road again tomorrow morning to go back to Clemson. It’s beginning to feel like I26 is becoming more of a second home for me than Clemson. Although I will miss Charleston3, I cannot wait to be back in tiger-town with all the awesome friends I’ve made over the past month or two.

  1. Except for the non-scrolling schedule debacle.↩

  2. Maintaining data consistency in distributed systems is one of the holy grails of modern web development, so any opportunity to get new fodder for thought on this problem is more than welcome.↩

  3. It’s kind of hard not to miss the (third) greatest city on Earth (as verified by Conde Nast).↩