Barcamp Bangkok 4

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Saturday

I can only comment on the talks I saw obviously

Registration

I arrived a bit late (Thai style) and registered, I was by no means the last. The WIFI logon/password were not the easiest combo to remember, though due a short session timeout I would become quite familiar with those devious letters and numbers.

f2.8 2010-10-23 10:40:03

Milling around at registration #bangkokbarcamp4

Facilities

The venue was a university and as such there was space for up to 70 in some of the larger rooms. In practice, the rooms were half full. Functionality varied, many of the projects had color problems and some were sufficiently cold that Thais were wrapping themselves up to keep warm. Even with Scottish blood flowing through my veins, it was a tad chilly.

f2.8 2010-10-23 11:15:34

The RVM talk is rather quiet #bangkokbarcamp4

I think my favourite was the pullpit, a raised wooden platform with a low desk which meant the speaker was much higher than his or her audience, but had to stoop to reach the computer.

f2.8 2010-10-23 14:10:35

Father @jfxberns at the pulpit #barcampbkk4

Toilets were clean and nicely signposted as below...

f2.8 2010-10-23 10:17:55

Toilet help for farangs #bangkokbarcamp4

I've seen similar signs in Cambodia. On the sunday morning I saw footprints on a toilet seat in the mens room, so the sign is obviously needed.

Ruby Version Manager

I attended a talk on Ruby Version Manager (RVM), it all looked simple enough, I just need to sit down and play with it. As well as figure out how to get Dreamhost to play happy with it and run Rails 3, which has been what has stopped me so far.

f2.8 2010-10-23 11:24:53

Learning about RVM #bangkokbarcamp4

Sinatra

I did not have to move for the second talk, handy as I could keep hold of my electrical point (and share it graciously via power board). Unfortunatley the speaker asked the audience if they preferred Thai or English, and I was the only one who had a preference for English. Oh well, I heard 'web development' and 'sanook' a lot, and the ruby code made sense :)

f2.8 2010-10-23 11:52:13

A better showing for the Sinatra talk #bangkokbarc

Bangkok Hacker Space

@jfxberns gave a talk on the idea of a Bangkok hacker space, invoking a discussion regarding location, sponsorship, ownership (community as opposed to single entity). Basically somewhere other than a coffee shop for programmers to meet and be able to bounce ideas off, and not feel isolated particularly if they work alone or at home a lot. Will be interesting to see this move forward

f2.8 2010-10-23 14:27:39

Almost a full room listening to @jfxberns #barcamp

f2.8 2010-10-23 14:18:45

A latecomer to the church #barcampbkk4

f2.8 2010-10-23 13:55:40

Waiting between talks #barcampbkk4

Making the Internet Suck Less in Thailand

@LukeInTH gave an excellent talk on the problems of the internet in Thailand, demonstrating how the various ISPs varied and the lies that they portrayed as speed tests (ping time showing obvious caching within Thailand even though traffic was portrayed as coming from San Francisco). He showed how to fix downloads using axel to download over N streams at once, and also demonstrated an as of yet unpublished tool written in node.js to take the same approach to other network traffic.  He demonstrated sucky and his non sucky version of watching a high definition youtube video.  Non sucky win.

f2.8 2010-10-23 16:14:42

@LukeInTh talking about the thai Internet #barcamp

XML, A Retrospective

James Clark gave a retrospective on XML, for which he has been involved with creating standards. He talked about the history of XML, and various spin offs from XML such as XML Schema, XLink, XSLT. In practice many XML tools have been replaced by Javascript and JSON - the dream of XML being served and XSLT converting it on the client seems to have died.

One phrase that sticks in my head from the talk is that they 'underestimated javascript'.  

f2.8 2010-10-23 17:14:27

James Clark giving an XML retrospective

Beer

Then we had beer and wine. No photos were uploaded due to darkness and sobriety issues.

Sunday

Talks on the Board

Topics were suggested and voted for, those with the most votes got a time allocated. For the morning my talk did not :(

f2.8 2010-10-24 10:40:27

How to make yoghurt struck me as an odd topic #bar

f2.8 2010-10-24 10:40:12

Choosing topics #barcampbkk4

Pick my talk, pick my talk!

Wordpress as a CMS

More projector problems, something that plagued a number of the talks, reducing talk time from 30 to 20 mins. Never really considered Wordpress as a CMS but will have a look into it.  The plugin code I saw all looked simple enough.

f2.8 2010-10-24 11:18:16

Learning more about wordpress

Career Paths in IT in Thailand

@proteus guy gave an interesting talk on what an IT career in Thailand is like. Basically the options seemed to boil down to

• 1) Learn a system, code it for 3 to 5 years, get promoted to manage other coders, and never touch code again yourself
• 2) Work for a small company, or start your own.  Keep coding, earn decent money

I definitely prefer option 2).  Throughout the day I heard people looking to recruit, including at the more interesting end of things like Ruby and python.  One old gentleman I overheard talking to some Thais mentioned he was looking for a JBoss/Struts guy but could not find one.  Errm, a time machine might come in handy...

f2.8 2010-10-24 11:42:28

People watching @proteusguy #barcampbkk4

f2.8 2010-10-24 11:34:54

Ben scherey preparing his tall on IT careers in Th

Postgres Query Analysis

f2.8 2010-10-24 14:10:28

Would you buy a used database from this man?

Jenoen (spelling?) gave a talk on how to analyze postgresql queries. He was a little hampered by a buggered projector and we had to move rooms. Only a windows computer was available to, so it could be said he was winging it :)  Given I know postgres reasonably well I knew what was going on and learned some cool tips like running a test twice to check if the query is cached in memory, and the fact that recalculation of statistics can break a long insert batch job.

f2.8 2010-10-24 14:18:01

A sequential scan #barcampbkk4

f2.8 2010-10-24 14:13:31

Here we see the query planner #barcampbkk4

f2.8 2010-10-24 14:10:17

Due to lack of diagrams, shadow puppets

HTML5 and CSS3

I only saw half of Max's (@maxart) talk but learning that PhoneGap could be used to deploy an iPhone app was something I did not know before and made my attendance worthwhile... more motivation to learn HTML5 in more detail.  Darn you interesting talk clash!!

Why Thailand Sucks for Start Ups

Based on issues brought up on an earlier blog post, @jfxberns chaired a discussion on the difficulties and barriers in the way of creating a lean mean start up in thailand. Issues that cropped up were

1) High initial capital compared with say the UK

2) Having to have 4 thai employees to each farang

3) Thai ownership must be > 50%

4) Paperwork, lots and lots of paperwork

The argument was one of that if IT workers are brought into the country they are not taking jobs away from Thais but instead creating wealth within Thailand. A figure from memory reckoned to be 1% of GDP.

It was interesting to hear a young thai couple talk about their frustrations of the system also, and not just a 'farang' angle.

Organizational Issues

One problem I saw mentioned by several people was the scheduling of talks.  Things chopped and changed quite a lot, and speakers were not notified.  I missed giving a talk at 1500 on Sunday as I did not find out that I was supposed to be presenting until 1600.  Can I suggest the following:

i) Notify the presenter via twitter and or email at least 30 mins in advance and get confirmation from them in return to ensure message received

ii) The schedules page look great in an iPad was less useful on an iphone.  A wide page with with the 8 or 12 rooms all on one row would facilitate just having to scroll horizontally and be able to see talks that were on at the same time more easily than scrolling vertically.  A 'current time' marker would have been good to, e.g. the row for say 1300 being a brighter shade of orange.

However I could see the lack of sleep in the bloodshot eyes of the organizers and know how busy they were / have been, so please consider the above as constructive criticism.

Wrapping Up

I had a good time, met lots of interesting people, and finally put some faces to twitter handles. Next year I will know better what to expect, as it was quite daunting with so many people around (almost 1000) turning up.  Congratulations to the organizers who have worked long and hard to make the barcamp a success - and without them the event would not have happened at all.

Comments and corrections if I got anything wrong to @elgrodo please - haven't added a comments section to this site yet :)

f2.8 2010-10-24 16:46:53

Time for indoor sports #barcampbkk4