dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

Saturday 29th November - and it's Barcamp Gold Coast #2. This is the 4th Barcamp in Queensland that I have involved with organising. I must have it pretty down-pat now as I did most of this one on my own. I think keeping the venue the same and the details as much the same as possible as the previous ones really helps things.

Sponsorship was must easier this year as I didn't do T-shirts which sucked a lot of our money last time. I also had a lot of stationery & materials left from the last one. Main sponsors were Griffith Uni (venue), MindWorx People (pizza), Apress (great books again), Refactor (internet) and Gold Coast Business (some Media/PR work)

Anyway - we had about 25 people, many of the same uber-networkers we have come to love at barcamps, such as Des Walsh & Michael Rees - but some new ones too. Thank-you to you all.

Our usual photographer DJ wasn't present, but Aaron Spence did an awesome job of photographs and even took one of his uber cool panedia photos. Thankyou so much Aaron.

Lee and I both did a presentation on some things we have been working on at Refactor. Lee on automated functional testing with WebTests and Selenium, myself on Continuous Integration. For those that are interested, the CI server that I used was called Hudson and I demo'd projects being built in various languages - Java, Groovy/Grails, Rails (via rake plugin) & PHP (via phing plugin). Very powerful tool and using CI really is a great start to getting into the Agile mindset... get in touch if you want to know more. I'll try and blog some more on this over at the Refactor Blog.

Lots more happened on the day, we did the Apress book giveaway (I just gave them to the presenters this time, no lottery) and people also bought their own books along to give away, we also did the hardware giveaway again (Des was unfortunately not able to offload his inkjet printer). I also gave out the Hackett and Bankwell Linux comics that I was sent to demo - they seemed well received - please give feedback to the author and return to me when you don't want them anymore and I can redistribute.

Anyway - this blog post has taken way longer than I intended (it's all those darn links) so I'll just hit submit now and spot the spelling/grammar errors later!