carolynlyn.com» events

BarCamp Barnsley March 2011

carolynlyn — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 12:32:48 +0000

Yesterday was BarCamp Barnsley. I could probably be described as a regular bar camper but I’ve never been to a Barnsley event before. The event was organised by bmedia who did a great job, alough I did get the impression they had never been to a barcamp that they had not organised before. I’m not sure what it was, just perhaps a bit of the barcamp spirit was missing, not really something that can be put into words.

The sessions were as usual a very good mix my favorite by far being about Hacking rock band drums with php by @tomnomnom who created his very own ASCII version of rock band. He also showed us evolution recreated in php which was impressive to say the least.

@martin88 gave an excellent talk on getting noticed on flickr.
My favorite tip was that you should upload your best photo last, as it is the one your friends are most likely to see. You can find Martin of flickr here.

Another very enjoyable session of the day was @ghalfacree‘s Keeping your Secrets Secret, and I now feel exceptionally paranoid about the world.

I’m looking forward to going again next year, but there will be many more BarCamps before then starting with BarCamp Sheffield on 16th and 17th April. Are you going?

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Hackcamp 2010

carolynlyn — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:53:07 +0000

This weekend was Hackcamp London 2010. 80 or so geeks camped out in Google London’s canteen building stuff. We all came filled with ideas and had 24 hours to make them work.

The day kicked off with a range of presentations running us through various APIs that we might liked to have worked with. There were a wide range of different APIs demoed all giving us more ideas about what we could build.

Ade Oshineye – Buzz
@themattharris Matt Harris – Twitter
Oliver Ogg – GigJunkie
Nick Johnson – AppEngine
Michael Mahemoff – Chrome/HTML5
Thong Nguyen – mFlow music APIs
Reinier Zwitserloot – Safari Extensions
Tim Nash – United Nations World Food Program

Hack prizes were announced including a prize for the best sandwich hack.

This is only the second hackday I’ve been too and I am really not much of a coder but I still managed to arrive with way too many ideas of what to build. Most of my ideas had started with a small idea and by the time I arrived into London on Saturday morning had mutated into gigantic ideas that would have been too much to make in a weekend even if I knew how.

So I built a twitter sentiment analysis app. It’s not 100% accurate and is still a bit buggy but I learnt a lot doing it and don’t think it’s bad for 24 hours work. I plan on working on it more in future as at the moment it is not as sophisticated as it could be. But like I said we had 24 hours.

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Think Visibility 2 – miaow miaow purrrrrr

carolynlyn — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:20:39 +0000

Ok, so I was going to write about Think Visibility and say how great the last one was and how much I am looking forward to the next one.

For those who don’t know in the words of the organiser:

“Think Visibility is a series of conferences on “the things that usually get left behind in the web design process“. The conferences feature well known speakers, new talent and great networking opportunities.

Think Visibility’s first outing, in March 2009, sold out within weeks. We discovered that there was an appetite for more of the same, covering a wider range of subjects.

So Think Visibility is back on 12 September 2009 – and this time, we’re bigger!”

Tickets are on sale now and if you want to get hold of one you should most definitely get your arse into gear before they sell out.

So I wanted to say more about Think Visibility but I got distracted. What could possibly distract me so much. hmm I am rather ashamed to say so instead i will ask a question. Why am I looking at a picture of your cat?

Yes, I know it’s not big and it’s not clever, but I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and really that’s all I can muster up as an excuse.

So erm for you viewing (dis)pleasure… from why am I looking at a picture of your cat:

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A northern SEM oddity

carolynlyn — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:08:13 +0000

Last night I appear to have had a bit of an adventure.

It started off quite relaxed with an after work visit to Wetherspoons to sup pear cider while we waited for the others to arrive.

Yum

Which I got ID’d for.

WTF!

TheHodge and I were met by Sarah who successfully completed the finding people in a Wetherspoons needle in a haystack challenge.
Over the road to Mr Foley’s to accidently offend the bar staff by ordering a selection of cider and ignoring their fine selection of beers. But it was clearly a cider drinking kinda night.

Oops

I thought I had a clear memory of the rest of the night until I read Tim’s recount of the evening. It may not be how I remember things but it is certainly a very eloquent tale of ranking terror, yoghurt and some rather fetching hats.

Northern SEM is a monthly meeting that is loosely tied around the SEM industry. It’s in Mr Foley’s on the first Friday of the month. So if you are interested in search, geekey, and or beer get yourself out next month.

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Northern Bloggers – 19th June 2009

carolynlyn — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:13:46 +0000

It’s that time of the month again! Yey.

What you mean “What time of the month”?

Why, it’s the monthly Northern Bloggers meetup of course!

Kicking off at 6pm in Old Broadcasting House and then heading to Mr Foleys.

TheHodge will be doing the presentation this month and telling us all about how he lost his blogging mojo. It promises to be a very interesting talk indeed.

A northern SEM oddity