Natalie Downe

This week has just been all go! Fresh from a successful project launch I dived straight into BarCamp. BT were generous in their provision of the great venue we used for the weekend. There were over 160 people attending, roughly 70 of whom stayed overnight we think!

Co-organising BarCamp with Ian and Jason was a lot of fun, sure I was running around and I didn’t get chance to have as many in depth conversations with people as I would like, but it was definitely an energetic and exciting weekend. I would do it again in a shot.

All the talks I went to were superb, I just wish I could have seen more - I was particularly upset at missing the improvisation sessions which I hear were fantastic! My personal favourite of the whole weekend was my sister Leu Downe who is an artist and not (yet) a web developer, but she had a great time and gave a presentation on how to release your inner owl to save it from being forced to produce ice cream!

Other talks (sorry if I miss any out) that I enjoyed and got something out from include:

• Design consequences by Lisa Reichelt - Fascinating technique to get everyone from the team involved in the behavioural design (the fun part) of an interface. 5-8 people sit together with lots of post-it notes paper and pens, everyone designs separately the same wireframe of the interface. After this you swap with the person next to you, annotate and improve on their design for another 5 minutes and then present what you now have to the group. The meaning behind this process is to get everyone involved and thinking about ideas of the design, development and consequences of the design.
• Project Management for busy geeks by Meri Williams - Good presentation aimed at busy geeks with little time for project management. The main point I got out of this was that planning isn’t always about producing artifacts you will use later on, it is more useful as a process just to get members of the team thinking about the project.
• User centric design by Andy Budd - Proposing the idea that usability is not everything, (”The ipod would have failed usability tests”) there needs to be more fun in design. Reasons behind the popularity of sites like myspace revolve around the interface being ‘game’ like, users are rewarded for exploring yet at the same time should be prevented from doing any serious damage to anything in the process of their exploration.
• Code reviews by Mark ‘Norm’ Francis - On the code review process at Yahoo! Code reviews in my opinion are important to the maintainability of a project but also as a quality assurance method within the team. Norm elaborated on the best way to perform regular code reviews with as little wasted time as possible. The thing in particular I got out of this talk is that every time an agreement is reached in the code review sessions, for example doctypes or the best way to do ‘x’ it is documented in a table with a reference to resolve future disputes. The code reviews Norm talked about had 3-6 people analysing the code in a quiet place away from IM, email and phones. After this they get together for 30 mins with the author (who is encouraged to say as little as possible) and discuss their findings and a moderator takes notes and keeps things on course. A list of recommendations is produced, these are addressed and then there is a followup meeting. I think this is a good process and it would be really interesting to see exactly how effective it is.

Strangely enough - I didn’t realise this till writing it up just now - all the talks above that I really enjoyed are about processes!

As anyone who was there knows though, BarCamp isn’t just about the talks - its about the energy created by the people that attend (and of course the now obligatory late night werewolf sessions!). The atmosphere last weekend was electric, the feedback received has been really positive which is fantastic.

Thanks once more to the generous sponsors of the event BT, BBC Backstage, O’Reilly, and Torchbox. All in all it was a very fun weekend! I met lots of really interesting people who I hope to see again, thanks to everyone who came and made it so enjoyable.