Over the weekend, Barcamp Rochester 4 took place here on campus at RIT. I have been helping to plan this event over the last few months and was pleased that it went off with any major problems! Around 60-80 people showed up of the course of an entire Saturday and there was a lock picking village that was open most of the day. I arranged most of the food and it seemed like my estimates were in order, I don’t think anyone left hungry!

To explain a bit further, Barcamp is a kind of informal conference, where everyone who comes, presents about a topic of their interest. Anything goes and most of the presentations are pretty informal, leading to open discussions about some topic occasionally. I enjoy the format overall, it’s flexible and focuses on sharing information in the simplest way possible.

My presentation was on OpenLaszlo and Flex, two technologies for creating rich internet applications. I had interned at Laszlo, the company that makes OpenLaszlo, over this previous summer and got them to send me out a box of t-shirts and swag to give away also. I felt it went off pretty well and I had a handful of people who came and listened. Several other of my friends gave talks on RF signals, Python, open government, Dwarf Fortress, and a whole host of topics. Overall, it was a good event!