A dinosaur with a tasteful amount of blood.
Tuesday’s Net2NO meetup provided a preview of all the excitement in store at this year’s BarCampNola conference. BarCamp will take place on July 14th and 15th at Canal Place.
Bar Camp is an “unconference”. While this jargon incited a minor revolt from Net2NO attendees, “unconference” simply means that the organizers do not determine the content of the conference. While subjects are frequently technology related, any attendee can present on any topic of their choosing on the first day of the conference. On the second day, attendees use their collective skills to work on a project for the community. Last year, BarCampers created NOLADEX in one day.
Minibar gave Net2NO a sampling of the style of BarCamp presentations. The presentations were about different aspects of the creation of this year’s BarCampNola website (seriously, click the link).
Joe Ellis, charged with building the BarCamp website, explained his inspiration for this year’s site. His underlying philosophy was that nerds sometime forget building things is fun. He then went on to explain the near linear relationship between the number of dinosaurs and the amount of fun. Another goal of the site was to involve community. Anyone can contribute to the site through github. At the time other of the presentation, nine local contributors added elements to the site, such as Scott Baio and the gorilla from Rampage.
John Clark IV, half of the Hop and Jaunt creative team, showed the process of designing the logo. The presentation took us through the several iterations of the project to the noble, mechanized beast you have before you. While the presentation provided a good case study on meeting a client’s graphic design needs, Mr. Clark explained Mr. Ellis’ request for more blood was unique.
Finally, Ben Lavender of Liveset presented on how to blow up anything using jQuery. Mr. Lavender used these skills to create the giant squid tentacles that blow up cockroaches, horse-dawn carriages, and asteroids on the BarCamp site with just a click. He walked us through the jQuery code to make the tentacle attack, make the object that gets attacked explode, and add sound to the explosion. It was a very informative presentation that we can all hope does not fall into the wrong hands.
Ultimately, this recap cannot do the presentations justice. You had to be there. BarCampNola will be no different.