This weekend, I decided to attend BarcampJB pretty last minute. Lucky for me, barcamps are made for chaotics like me, so it was no problem at all. I found some friends that live here in Kuala Lumpur who I drove down to JB with (JB is around a 5 hour drive from KL, we did it in 3.5 ).

The camp was very interesting. Because JB is on the border with Singapore, there’s a good crossover between Malaysian and Singaporean techies.

I decided to go all out and give three talks on Saturday: First up was the MMM talk I’ve given at a few conferences before. All went well, and later on in the day some people approached me for more in-depth questions. It still seems that people have this idea in their head that they somehow need MySQL Cluster when there is more then one machine involved. When I explain them that that is very rarely …

Open Query is pleased to sponsor BarCamp Melbourne, a rocking unconference held at UrbanCamp, Royal Park, Melbourne VIC (Australia). If you’re anywhere nearby this coming weekend (12-13 September 2009), you really really want to be there and participate, learn, and enjoy! Open Query’s own Peter Lieverdink (cafuego) will be there.

Barcamps are run at low cost, but of course there are still costs, so it’s very important that lots of businesses and people toss in something to help cover that. If you would like to contribute, just follow the links and Ben or Donna will be happy to help.

Daniel (aka Mr. Messina of Malaysia) is organising a bunch of events, and since they’re on weekends, I’m going to gladly participate, without seeking approval from the overlords.

First up is Startup Camp KL, on 22-23 November 2008, in MidValley. On Sunday, I’m going to lead a session titled “Using Free Software to bootstrap your startup”. Check out the agenda. It should be fun, especially in today’s market to ensure there are no software licensing costs, especially if you’re a startup.

Then there’s BarCampJB, 6-7 December 2008, in Johor Bahru. I haven’t been there in…. ages :) I’ll be talking about “MySQL Best Practices for Developers”, where we’ll go …

Yesterday I went to beCamp 2008 along with four roomfuls of other people interested in technology (perhaps close to 100 people total). The conference was a lot of fun. Not everything went as planned, but that was as planned. This was an Open Spaces conference and I thought it worked very well. From an email Eric Pugh sent:

Basically it all boils down to:

Open Space is the Law of Two Feet: if anyone finds themselves in a place where they are neither learning nor contributing they should move to somewhere more productive. And from the law flow four principles:

• Whoever comes are the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
…

I’m going to be at beCamp 2008, the followup to the first beCamp, which I sadly missed.

beCamp is a BarCamp un-conference. Tonight was about meeting, greeting, and throwing ideas at the wall to see which ones stick. Literally. We stuck pieces of paper on the wall with our ideas — things we can either talk about or want to hear about — and then scratched our votes on them to see which are popular.

I live and breathe MySQL for a decent part of the day, so I hesitated, but then stuck “MySQL Performance” on the wall. It got quite a few votes, so I assume will be giving a talk on MySQL performance basics at some point during the conference. (The exact schedule is probably being determined right now, in my absence, but I’m so tired right now that I’ll just take my chances on it not being at 8:00 AM tomorrow.) [edit: I just checked the website and there won’t be …

Since 2005, every year we have done some kind of "Mayflower weekend". As we're a bit of a distributed company (departments in Munich and Würzburg, called Herbipolis, several "on-site departments" at some of our biggest customers, an offshore department in beautiful Argentinia and since 2007 a sister company called SektionEins located at Cologne watching out for Web Security) it's always fun packing the crowd together and putting them into a hotel somewhere in Germany (or Barcelona, Spain in 2006 and Budapest, Hungary in 2007). If you followed Wolfram's blog you noticed that we also had some external guests (if you need a Dojo freelancer, I recommend hiring Wolfram although he's a Pythoneer ;-) ) alongside the camp. The event was located at the hotel …

Barcamp Brussels 4 is comming

It?s decided! Barcamp Brussels #4 will take place on Saturday Dec 1st, in the mVillage business center in Schaarbeek, close to the Koninginneplein, Kruidtuin/Botanique and the Brussels North station (thanks for the help, Simon).

I am a conference junkie. I love attending them, organizing them, speaking at them, planning to attend them, seeing my friends at conferences, making friends with the nice (but often stressed) people who run conferences and so on. I even like eating the (often bad) food - kvetching about it builds a sense of camaraderie with the other participants.

Given how much time and money I spend on conferences already, it might be hard for you to be able to get more money directly out of me. However, here is one small tip on a way that you might be able to do this.

When you send me email about upcoming events, send me links to useful feed as well. Many of you are technologists who run technology conferences for other technologists. For Zarquon’s sake, use the common pieces of technology that many of us use.

What would such feeds look like? Well, to answer my own rhetorical question …
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