All in all a good weekend. Didn't get time to prep any of the talks I wanted to do because of university but still managed to contribute by chucking my weight into two talks about gaming by @losvaive(more on those later). It felt like a very long weekend thanks to the F1 being on so early.


General Feelings

This is not my first barcamp but thanks to the refreshing lack of free beer it's the first one I've attended for the whole weekend rather than wasting half of it hungover. Also as I'm coming to the end of university it's the first one where I've gone because of a desire to learn things for myself rather than being my girlfriend's other half. The space we used in the Workstation was really nice, and again no easy access to a bar really helped to keep things focused. This barcamp felt much more like a community than the others I've been too. I still struggle though with the community aspect, I very much feel like I still don't fit in despite getting on pretty well with a fair few people. This is partially down to my lack of tech experience and partially down to my general lack of confidence in social settings. I didn't do a talk because I don't feel as I am in a position of someone with knowledge able to give to those without. I am sure confidence will come with experience and preparation.


Sessions

The first session I attended was a conversation about documentation and technical writing. Being a technical writer is something I have considered doing in the future and it was interesting to hear about how being a good writer requires you to be a good social person as you have to write to many different audiences and talk to many different people in order to gather information. The user testing aspect was something I hadn't expected and that really piqued my interest.

The second session was a talk on contracting. I went to this mainly for Katie's benefit but I found it very useful myself. Not so much how to be a contractor but how to create a business; something that I would like to have in my future. Next was Liam's talk on gaming bucket list, lots of interesting stuff in here and it led very nicely into the session we conducted later in the afternoon. Katie's space shuttle presentation went down really well, her obvious love of the subject helped to make the more technical material go down pleasantly.

Our session was about "Are video games good for you?", an informal talk/discussion. I think originally we were going to present a lot of examples supporting the notion whereas on the day we went more for a good cop/bad cop approach, me in favour and him against. The resulting conversation went from exercise to social skills via a discussion on rating systems, Hot Coffee and WoW Anonymous. Lots of people were there and contributing and it was a really fun discussion, so fun in fact we ended up using two timeslots but the feedback was good.

Sunday was predictably quieter, we missed the first two sessions due to fast cars and Nick Heidfeld fail. A continuation of Saturday's gaming talk was held concerning games as learning tools. This went less well than I had hoped due to lack of preparation and veering off topic in many places but again we discussed whether games should be used in schools and the state of IT education in general, something I may follow up on at a later talk as I've been reading stuff about that for my project. Played a card game called Flux in the afternoon as a demonstration of software development problems. Was much better fun than I was expecting and very informative. After the first general game I watched others play again, this time assuming roles of developer, user, sponsor and project manager. This I also found very interesting, the people play and the assumptions about the various roles were humorous but obviously based on experience.


Conclusion

So much fun. I would really like to build upon the themes discussed in the gaming talks in a formal presentation. By the end of the weekend I felt much more part of something and I think I need to get over my nervousness and just jump in to a gistmag(probably June) with a talk and see how that goes. Looking forward to next years! And thanks to the organisers of course.

Also: gingerbread house.