Decompression after BarCamp

Did I mention I don't like linking to other sites for fear the links will turn into a 404 (must finish my mirror module!).

So, my first thought for this post title was "back to the real world", but it's a redundant title and, apparently, a recurring theme.

Today was the last day of BarCamp and I'm exhausted. As one of maybe 10 people who stayed overnight both days, and without a Thermarest (how did I forget my Thermarest? Forgetting that was worse than forgetting my Wacom), my hips have floor bruises from sleeping on my side on the floor.

Okay, not really. But that floor was hard.

And I couldn't stand the lack of showers for two days in a row. Somehow, the sponge bath just won't cut it for two days. I drove home and showered this morning. Aaaaaaah. And I couldn't stay all the way through the end, as I had practice (fortunately close) at 3:00. So sad, to miss the last 4 hours, plus FooCamp meet up at a (I'm guessing) noisy bar. Shucky darn.

An amazing weekend. I'm unbelievably happy I went. I met so many people whose sites I've visited, bookmarked, followed and enjoyed (even a Hodson!). I learned, once again, that this world is terribly small. Many of the people knew each other either from previous conferences, friendships, jobs or projects. Fortunately, not knowing most of the people meant I had little fear meeting them. Though, admittedly, I had met some of them last Tuesday.

On Friday, one of Andy's and Chris' worries was about sessions filling up nicely: would they have too many or too few? I countered, if there are too few, the space could be filled with small birds-of-a-feather discussions; if they are too many, people can meet up later, create groups outside, or, to be perfectly honest, decide not to present. In other words, the sessions will even themselves out.

I was mostly right, but a bit wrong. There were actually a ton of sessions, several (not one, but many more) people commenting they wanted to present, but there were no time slots left. The ad-hoc way of creating sessions meant pretty much every slot had multiple good sessions/topics at once. Which then meant we had to choose which one to go to.

Boo.

Because that meant, we were almost guaranteed to miss out on interesting topics.

For example, I managed to miss the Women in Tech session, presented by Eris Stassi (yay! figured out how to spell her name!), though I managed to attend most of the follow up session, a women run open source project.

The Microformats session from Ryan and Kevin was a good introduction to the topic, though the room was incredibly stuffy and hot. I think that everyone was sweating by the session end.

I need to check out my notes on the rest of the sessions I attended. Some were great, others interesting, all totally full of energy and enthusiasm.

Happily for the weekend, I met many really cool people. I'd trade no sleep for the chance to meet all the people I met again.

Heading to practice afterward was a mini culture shock. Going from disk talk to disc talk (or talking tech to running my ass off) was transitioning between two subcultures, each with somewhat well-defined, but very different, accepted behaviour. And I love both of them, but they are different. Easiest example: I'm more likely to grab a teammate's butt than a BarCamp attendee's.

Especially if said attendee is Scoble.

For example.