Kim and I had a great time at BarCamp in New York this weekend. We met a ton of like-minded people doing incredible things.

Our presentation on “Hacking the Long Tail: Making Collaborative Filtering work for WineLog.net” went well. I was hoping to get educated by someone in the audience who knew more about the Long Tail than I did, but people were either busy making impromptu business plans in a competing session or more interested in WineLog iteself than the Long Tail.

The wine tasting part did go over well. There was a lot of wine left over, but that just made our evening more interesting. You can see which wines we tasted at BarCamp NYC2 at WineLog.

Presentation PPT: BarCamp_Presentation.ppt (blog post to follow)
Completed Wine Tasting Spreadsheet: BarCampNYC2_WineTasting.xls

The presentation and tasting was filmed, but I’m not sure if it is online yet. I’ll link to it when it shows up.

Here is a brief (and no way complete) list of interesting people we met this weekend:

• Chris from VistaPrint. Chris was a fun guy to hang out with. Kim and I are big fans of VistaPrint; their cheap inexpensive printing services help us save a ton of money for our clients. I was as excited to meet someone from VistaPrint as I would be to meet someone from the Chicago Bears. At the same time, Chris was excited to meet real users of the system he works on.
• Nate Abele from CakePHP. Nate is a PHP developer to look up to. If there were PHP developer trading cards, I would covet his rookie card. His project Cake is a framework for PHP. It’s similar to the popular “Rails” framework for the Ruby programming language but for PHP. Unlike some other PHP frameworks, Cake doesn’t just try to mimic Rails. Instead it is built with PHP developers in mind and works off the strengths and weaknesses of PHP. It’s really interesting stuff, and I’m excited about trying it out with a future projects. It would have been great for WineLog if I had looked into it more before I custom-coded a lot of what Cake offers.
• David Cohn. David writes for Wired.com. He’s writing an article about BarCampNYC2, which might feature Kim and I as crazy Philadelphians who made the trip up to New York to walk around in our socks and talk to geeks.
• Dean “the Australian” Collins. Dean does a lot of things (like us!), but just seems to love helping startups start up. He was always good for a good comment/question in any session he attended. You can find out more about Dean and his work at Cognation.net.
• Avi Welnsky. Avi writes for us over at InvestorGeeks. I had never met him in person though… cool guy. Among other things, he taught me a great way to get a high page ranking in MSN’s search engine.

I can’t relate how great the atmosphere was at BarCamp. I had that feeling like “these are my people”. There were a lot of attendees I wish I could have spent more time talking with. Contacts were made though, and I’m sure we’ll follow up. For others, we’ll just have to wait for the next BarCamp.

By jason |  October 2nd, 2006 | 12:59 pm |  Filed under News | Permalink