Professional

I attended my first Barcamp this weekend at the Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center in Atlanta.  What is Barcamp, you ask?  It's an unconference, where the agenda is decided by the participants.  For this reason, all attendees are encouraged to participate by offering a presentation or demo, or at least participating in a discussion.  As a barcamp virgin, I wasn't ready to give a presentation this year, but next year I'll be better prepared.  I did my best to be engaged in the discussions, ask good questions, and get to know the many others from the Atlanta (and nearby) technology community.

For a free event, I was really impressed with the amenities.  The ATDC is a first-class facility, with plenty of conference rooms with whiteboards and projectors.  Also, our sponsors really took care of us, providing a barbecue dinner Friday, Flying Biscuit sandwiches for breakfast on Saturday, and pizza for lunch.  Also, there was free soda, coffee, and beer.  What more could you ask?  Nobody went away hungry.

The wide variety of people, in terms of expertise and lines of work, really made this a cool event, covering a wide array of topics.  Some of the sessions I attended included:

• Independent Consultants - Pricing your Services
• Genetic Algorithms (OK, I still don't really get what those are)
• Erlang overview and demo
• Starting a website: Framework (Rails, CakePHP, etc.) or CMS (Drupal, Wordpress, etc.)?
• How to generate buzz without being treated like a spammer
• "Push Protesting" - using Microformats to get your minority message out
• Yahoo Pipes demo (Sanjay Parekh's construction of startupgossip.com)
• COPPA - the Child Online Protection and Privacy Act, and how it affects your site
• BeagleBoard demo (what is that?  see http://beagleboard.org)
• Web Security resources and tools
• Twitter API
• Open Source roundtable

There were some off-the-wall sessions as well (which, perhaps unfortunately, I didn't attend):

• Freezing different types of food in liquid nitrogen
• "Alternative Funding" - (ahem - it was a poker game)
• Be your own beatbox (making beatbox sounds in a microphone)
• Be your own barista (making coffeehouse coffee in your own home)

Overall, Barcamp is worth attending for just about anyone with an interest in technology, even if it's just a passing interest.  You'll come away from it with a new appreciation for technology, the people involved in it, new things you may have never heard about, and a renewed excitement to learn more.

After months of neglect, I am finally writing a new post!  As I dove head-first into the world of web consulting, I got too busy to keep this site up-to-date.  But now I'm back--still busy, just better organized.

Kudos to consumer guru Clark Howard for discussing open source alternatives on his radio show.  He specifically mentions OpenOffice in his show notes.  He is correct that businesses and consumers can save lots of money by using free, open source alternatives to expensive commercial applications such as Microsoft Office.

This is just further evidence that open source software has entered the mainstream.

(Image courtesy of bnnrc.net,  under a creative commons license.)

Drupal gets considerable praise for being versatile, flexible, and open. At the same time, it is often criticized for being difficult to configure, with a large learning curve even for seasoned developers. So given the criticism, why do I use it? And why do I recommend it to clients? This article provides an overview of Drupal, and in doing so, explains why I stake my business on it.

The other day I ran across a couple of interesting posts on whdb.com which together make a great resource for any evangelist of open-source software:

• The Top 50 Proprietary Programs That Drive You Crazy - And Their Open Source Alternatives: a comprehensive list of applications that have open source counterparts. Some well-known applications appear on the list, such as OpenOffice as a replacement for Microsoft Office, and Mozilla Firefox as a replacement for Internet Explorer. But there were a couple I had not heard of before, such as TurboCash as an open source replacement for MS Money, and Compiere as an open source replacement for QuickBooks. I will be sure to give those a try, and I will provide a report of my experiences.
• Top 25 Linux Games For 2008: all work and no play makes Paul a dull boy, so we can't forget games! Of the 25 games on the list, the only one I have actually tried is the FlightGear flight simulator (available for both Linux and Windows), but you bet I'll try FreeCiv (similar to Sid Meier's "Civilization" game) and Frets On Fire, which appears to be a "Guitar Hero" lookalike.

I'm excited by the amount of open source activity out there. Linux and open source are no longer for hobbyists: it's for everyone. Why pay a ransom to some big corporation for mediocre software? Try an open source alternative instead.