PABCAS, the blog of Paul Martin Campbell

I was very happy to attend BarCamp Dublin ( wiki ) yesterday, and offer the first presentation I’ve ever given outside an educational establishment. I talked about Ruby on Rails and gave a little demonstration on how to get things up and running. It was good fun – the best way of learning anything is just getting out and doing it. I kept the presentation quite thin, but I hope that it was useful to those who attended.

I for one appreciate the ability to just put my name on a wiki one day and be presenting to a hugely attentive audience and quite a big one at that.

I also met a whole lot of really interesting people during the day – people that have been out doing this whole business on the web thing for years. Conor Halpin of LeCayla ( I can only imagine the smiles on the US clients’ faces when they learn the meaning behind the name! ) gave an entertaining and informative talk on “How to Price SaaS.” I was quite inspired in our talk over lunch about just how open he is to entertaining ideas and I hope we’ll get a chance to talk again in the coming months as the projects I’ve been getting involved in start taking shape.

One disappointment on the day was the lack of any decent WiFi access, despite keys being handed out. I’m sure there was good explanation, but there were a lot of disillusioned geeks. In his talk on Social Media and marketting, Darren Barefoot had expected to be able to be online and kept shifting from his presentation to “Server Error” Firefox pages. A shame, but a great presentation. Great to meet the man behind getafirstlife.com ( Go outside, membership is free! )

Patchwork brainchild Eoghan McCabe (blog) gave his “Web Usability 101” – particularly interesting for me as I’m currently reading Prioritizing Web Usability and it was enlightening to see Eoghan up there forcing us to think about not making him think!

It was also good to meet Tom Raftery ... Tom’s one of the levelest heads and smartest IT guys in Ireland and that showed in his gracious handling of my over exuberant initial tech discussion and further in his balanced participation in the panel during the afternoon and the cool authority of his presentation on CIX data centre developments.

I also started an impromtu discussion about Co Working and whether anyone was interested in trying to get something set up in Dublin. I’ve set up a tentative google group and once there’re a few people there I’m hoping to further the discussion.

What’s great about BarCamp is the mix of people and discussions available. Maman Poulet shares a completely different experience from mine, even though our schedules seemed to have been similar enough.

Rounding the event off, there was more free booze in the Lord Edward than I’ve ever been offered at one of these events. I’ve had unlimited booze parties of course, but my experience with tabs to date has been that they generally run out just as I’ve had too much to be able to stop… this one just went on and on and on. Good stuff. Had some great banter with Sean O’Sullivan and Joe Drumgoole ...

To my dismay, Mr. Paul Walsh wasn’t about. I credit Paul with pretty much opening me up to the Irish tech industry with his Fancy a Curry 2.0 at the start of Feb. It’s that night that’s got me going out and talking to people and generally lifting my spirits that there’s a hugely exciting web industry to be cracked in Ireland. He’s also a great drunk.

Finally, Eoghan, I’m sorry for weighing you.