Barcamp London 4

Im at the first day of barcamplondon4, which is being held this week-end at GCAP's main offices in the west end of london. The "unconference" is running true to form, with delegates producing talks with wide ranging subject matter, such as "vitalising social networks", "scaling ruby on rails", "doing business in china" to "Australian wine". 

One of the rules of barcamp, is that anybody who attends must give a talk. GCAP is raising the stakes this year by recording all the presentation and making them available on its podcasting network, which is a first for barcamp. 

The other purpose of barcamp is the opportunity to network with people in the European web developer community, and barcamp attracts folks from all over Europe. This years event is particularly well attended by people from far shores, due to the concurrent running of "London Web Week" and events such as "@Media", making the week long trip to London an attractive proposition for those that want to cram in a whole years worth of developer conferences in one hit. 

I met a fascinating individual ( George Palmer) of idlasso.com who like myself is focused mainly on configuration and deployment issues, and we spent a enjoyable half hour exploring what the ultimate deployment architecture for small start-ups could look like, given the available and upcoming options. 

For myself, I am planning to do a talk on our own experiences of using some of these options to develop and deploy bejant.com, a nascent social network site, designed to introduce graduate students to potential employers. 

Anyway enough for now, I have to go and soak in more good material well i have access to such a concentration of braincells in one place.