What a great way to spend a day

It was a fun time at BarCampEarthToronto. I had grand ambitions to be the conference photographer, but I got side-tracked by a lot of very interesting conversations. So I only shot 9 frames- the best of the lot is this photo of Sacha Chua who led a session on Networking for Introverts.

The rest of the photos from the conference are up on flickr

I did a session on evangelizing dynamic languages, where I presented a version of my VS Live keynote talk. I think I achieved my original goal of converting at least one person to dynamic languages. I also had the privilege of having Adam Growe, a real presenter observe my talk in the audience and I’m looking forward to getting his critical feedback on how I executed my presentation.

Most of the time I was an attendee in the “hallway track” where I hung out in the common area between the different conference rooms and chatted with whoever was there. For those who haven’t attended one of these, I would describe the BarCamp experience as a way to hang out with a bunch of different folks from different walks of life. Yes, we have a common binding interest in technology, but many of the people there were doing very different things. Some folks were running startup companies, other folks were thinking about doing a startup, some ran consulting shops, some were developers, others were students.

At the very end of the evening I wound up hanging out with Ryan McKegney of RedFlagDeals (where their motto is ‘Going broke saving money!’) and Seneca Cunningham over at the Linux Cafe where Seneca is a part time sysadmin for their network of computers. There, I saw the January, 1986 issue of Compute! magazine

I had a fun time taking a trip down memory lane. It’s hard to believe that issue is over 20 years old now …