Back From BarCampLA
Spent the weekend at BarCampLA. Had a blast.
I gave an “Intro to Symfony PHP5 Framework”, and showed how to start building an app from scratch and start getting value back in about 15 minutes.
Saw a lot of really cool stuff as well from other smart folk.
Here are my highlights:
Musix!
Kenneth Wyrick and I sat around and played with his Live CD collection. He really opened me up to some really cool distros and packages. The one that really blew me away was Musix. It’s a LiveCD with all the kick ass Linux Music apps configured and ready to use. Stick in the CD, and instantly you have a great music production/streaming environment. Ardour, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, Jack, and IceCast, plus lots of other goodies I didn’t have time to try.
Chris Holland talked about Microformats and SIP, very cool. you can view his presentation here
Raj Singh showed off an app called “PubWalk”, which helps you find and track the routes to bars in any city. I think many people were sad to learn that “PubWalk” on the schedule didn’t mean we were actually going to walk around the neighborhood and drink. Great app Raj, can’t wait for it to come out!
Travis Kalanick showed off Red Swoosh, which allows content providers to deliver their files to the user and “Never pay for bandwidth again”. good stuff. They’re looking for good web devs too, both on the frontend/javascript end and linux backend. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll pass on your info.
Jonathan Strauss showed off IPTV. Woah. The future is cooler than you think.
Lucas Gonze of WebJay/Yahoo! gave a great talk about trends in online music communities.
Michael Spiegelman of Yahoo! talked about Y!’s Audio Search engine. This is such a mind boggling difficult subject to approach, and it’s a testimate to the brilliant minds over there that they even attempt to conquor this space. Very intersting challenges here, thanks for sharing Michael.
And Ian talked about Media 2.0 Physics, in which he rightly described the akward and confusing transition both the Music and Tech industries are experiencing while merging and who’s really in it to win it.
For ever presentation I saw, there were two others happening simultaneously. Sux to have missed those, but I hope people will post their goodies and spread the love.
BarCamp was great. Thanks to everyone who helped put it together, including Little Radio, for allowing us to crash their beautiful space.