Upon the prodding of Mikong, I attended the recent Barcamp Manila held in Ortigas last Thursday. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, as I’ve never attended any such conference before, and I’ve never been particularly involved with the local developer community, but I said I’d go anyway, I figured it’d probably be fun.
The event was held at the Orient Square building at the offices of Exist Global and Morph Labs, who sponsored the event. I was a bit worried since I’m going in without having a presentation, although everyone is encouraged to present. Turns out I needn’t have worried – over 80 people attended the event, there wouldn’t have been enough time for everyone to present!
All in all, the talks were interesting, with a wide range of technical topics discussed involving multiple programming languages including C++, Java, Ruby and Python (with much playful jeering between the many Ruby advocates and the few Java developers). There was even a short comedy sketch by Mario Carreon.
It felt good getting to know the community and meet some new people and see the cool (and geeky) things local developers are doing. Although I code day in and day out for work, I could probably still learn a lot from the development community. The uptake of newer technologies is a lot faster in the community than at work, so somehow it’s a refreshing change of pace.
Hmm… I wonder if I would be able to rustle up something to present at the next Barcamp?
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Uptake of new technology is pretty much limited by business considerations, but it's still no excuse to limit expanding developers' horizons. Unfortunately the current trend of us moving towards generalization of skills over specialization pretty much screws up the progress department - we end up with engineers who have a broad range of outdated unpolished skills than engineers with less, but more honed, skills.
Coding day-in-day-out also tends to give a false sense of "experience". As I've said to Keis a couple of times already, "There's a difference between 10 years of experience and 1 year of experience ten times over". Even looking at my own code a year ago makes me facepalm at how little effort we spend in making sure that our "tools"/"saws" are sharp.
Problem is, we've been making too much noise recently that it's possible that people would dismiss this as yet another random rabble. XP We have to get the timing right… and possibly gather surveys or statistics or whatever first to drive points home.
(Posting about this stuff externally has a different impact - it hints that there's already a small group of people initiating changes inside a company wherein changes were traditionally dictated only by the core group. Hehehe… )
Nice to hear you enjoyed the first BarCamp Manila, Roy!
Hope to see you again next time.
regards,
leah