Just got back this morning from a great weekend in Waterford at Barcamp South East. Congratulations and thank you to Tom Corcoran, Keith Bohanna and everyone else involved in organizing the day. It was really great fun meeting and putting faces to the names I’ve been reading over the past months and years.

So here’s what I got to during the day…

Aidan Finn’s session on Rails, Django, TurboGears. Apart from the getting up to speed on the various frameworks out there the most interesting point I took from this session was that there’s the real lack of Rails developers in Ireland. I wonder how this will change over the coming year as Rails gets more popular?

Donncha O Caoimh’s session on WordPress & WordPress MU. It was interesting to hear how Automattic handle the challenge of hosting so many popular blogs. On a personal level Donnacha discussed how he copes with working from home and working for a US based company (getting paid in dollars, yikes).

Justin Mason’s session on Amazon’s S3 and EC2 web services. I’ve been really interested in these particular webservices recently so it was good to hear from someone who’s actually used them. One interesting point raised by Justin and seconded by Joe Drumgoole is that S3 can be quite unreliable (GET’s timing out). I wonder if this is a common occurence or just a localized problem?

The panel discussion on “Finding money for your start-up”. I only caught the end of this particular talk unfortunately.

The second panel discussion on “Building a Web Services company”. The panelists were very forthcoming about their particular companies, the problems they had/have, where they’re going and what business model is. It was strange to hear from more than one panelist that finding good developers in Ireland is really difficult. I guess developers need to do more to promote themselves. I used FreeMind to take some notes during this session. Here’s the png and the original mm. Apologies if some of it is meaningless or if I recorded the details incorrectly.

TJ McIntyre’s session on “Who owns software?”. This session covered the legal side of software development. I never knew it was such a minefield. The lesson learned is that you should always have a contract with your employer and it should clearly state who will own the copyright to the developed software (and sourecode).

One of the most fun parts of the day was the Pecha Kucha session at the end. Who would have guessed that a fews seconds and a few slides could have been such a laugh.

All in all a very enjoyable day. I’m looking forward to the next barcamp already.