An (Interesting) BarCamp Orlando Recap

I just returned from my first trip to BarCampOrlando. Instead of boring you with the individual panel remarks, I decided to take the cynical approach.

Saturday at BarCampOrlando Developer Day started off decently. The usual cliques of the locals developed instantly, but I did not let that deter me. I tried to weasel my way into any conversation with comments that were sure not to make any of the developers angry. Things like "hey, this guy was telling me PHP is much better than Rails" and "Outsourcing Rules." The kind of stuff that seems to help people want to be friends with me! If only Dale Carnegie knew how much I learned from his book! Here are some of the things that I learned from Developer Day:

• If you want your website to work, you have to be like Gary Vee
• British people sound so much better when presenting ideas, I am thinking about picking up one of those accents so people listen to me more seriously.
• Seems the only thing Rails and PHP guys get along about is heckling the .net guys during their meetings!
• One of the Panel speakers says the web will close again, since it is cyclical and we are currently in an open period
• Another Panel speaker said while twitter spends tons of money to make their site work better, we use our brains instead of money.
• Do not dress up when going to tech events, you stick out in a crowd and the guys dressed in flip flops and ripped shorts will comment to each other about how tacky you look
• The Antichrist of the internet is centralized corporate control.
• Data portability is for everyone but facebook.

Sunday started off with rain and only 1/3 the amount of people as Saturday. I guess developers have no interest in Media day. It seemed like the rain was more eventful than the topics being discussed. I do not think it is wise to start panels at 10:30am on a Sunday morning after the majority of the attendees were out partying the night before. Sometimes Guitar Hero and Rockband are too much for most tech guys in one evening! There were very few discussions to attend, and it seemed the free food was what most people were talking about. So all in all, it was a nice event, and I would certainly go back again next year. The only thing that will keep me from attending next year is if they use those cheap name tag stickers again, cause they stained my white shirt black!

This conference recap was provided by Craig Agranofff. Craig is the Site Czar of VOIS, a publicly traded global social networking community.