the ryan king

A bit of XTech wrapup, loosely organized….

Peeps

Got to see some friends/acquaintences:

• Simon
• Tom
• Jeremy
• Brian
• Thomas
• Matt
• Andy
• Suw

Got to meet some people:

• Uche
• Paul
• Nadya
• Anne
• Deb
• Rob
• …and others that I’ll remember later.

Went to some talks:

1. Paul Graham: How American Are Startups?, see Jeremy’s reaction
2. Matt Biddulph: BBC on Rails, mo’ data, mo’ beta
3. Mark Nottingham: HTTP Caching for Web 2.0, eh
4. Steve Pemberton: The Power of Declarative Thinking, some have been annoyed by my recent obsession with declarative functional languages. This only made it worse.
5. Suw Charman: Ignorance is not a defence (digital rights stuff), good overview of how the digital age has affected our rights
6. Paul Hammond: Open (data) can of worms, business and philosophic ideas around open data
7. Tom Coates: Native to a Web of Data, great talk, though Tom needs more than 45 minutes for it
8. Thomas Vander Wal: Developing for the Personal Infocloud, good stuff
9. Ben Lund: Social Bookmarking for Scientists, about Connotea
10. Simon Willison: Django: Web development on journalism deadlines, Django looks very useful, maybe I should actually try it someday
11. David Beckett: Semantics Through the Tag, an overview of semantics and tagging– need to write more about this.
12. Jeff Barr: Amazon Web Services, *snore*
13. Jeff Barr: Mechanical Turk, *snore*
14. Brendan Eich: Javascript 2, awesomely lambda geeky

Gave some talks:

1. Microformats from the Ground Up
2. The Intelligent Design of Microformats

Drank some beers:

• Heineken
• Palm - tasty Belgian beer
• de Koninck
• … and others I don’t remember clearly

There’s a bunch of other ideas and thoughts I’ll blog soon.

I’m sitting at BarCamp Amsterdam II (or, as I prefer to call it– BarCampsterdam) just chillin’. Its been a good week here in Amsterdam, but more on that later.