Thoughts, early 21st century

The news rarely mention the positive aspects of the Internet, but there are hundreds! Yesterday I attended a BarCamp for the first time and I really enjoyed it. Even it is not strictly an Internet thing, it is often organized and announced through the Internet.

Since it was my first time I'm really not an expert on this, but for what I've seen, a BarCamp is a one or two day event where people meet, present and discuss ideas. BarCamps are a kind of unconference. According to Wikipedia, they are participant-driven meetings. In normal conferences there is a speaker and many listeners. But unconferences have many speakers who are also the listeners.

A few years ago there was an Android related BarCamp in Berlin. That was the first time I heard about this idea, but I did not attend. I must admit that one of the reasons was that I believed that a self organized meeting would have a low quality. But I was wrong.

Yesterday we were about 20 or 30 people. The program was decided in the morning, as people wrote on a whiteboard the time and title of their presentation. The event took place at the Futurice offices, which is a beautiful space. There were free drinks, including Club Mate :) There were a few technical presentations about mobile phone development and others about photography, music writing and the Internet. I also gave an improvised presentation about my Fun Programming videos.

I'm glad I participated.

I'm now going to tell my friends in Mallorca they should organize a BarCamp there =)

It's been a long time. More than 100 days since the last time I posted something to this blog. But my lack of writing was not the only change. I also got rid of my camera after 8 years, my sound recorder, my office in Berlin, my bank account and my cell phone contract. I sent four big boxes by post to Finland, where I live since three months ago. I wonder why I didn't post here... I've had a list of posts I wanted to write for quite a long time, but somehow I was lazy and usually micro-blogging. Writing takes time and gives back an increasing visit counter on a web site, but what else? :)

For two months now I have focused in creating videos. I started on August 1st. I had heard that if you do something every day for 21 days in a row it becomes a habit. So I decided to create one video each day of August. It's now October and I'm still motivated to continue. I feel good sharing what I've learnt with others. If my videos are useful for at least for one person, then it was already worth my effort. And it is an effort. I work on it several hours per day, and often think about the next episode when doing something else.

At the same time, I enjoy learning. I learn about speaking, recording and editing videos. I use my imagination thinking of ways to explain concepts and making exercises up. I learn about Processing and I practice having ideas in my head and converting them into programs. It brings back the fun that programming used to be when I was a kid.

It's nice to receive messages from people around the world once in a while saying that it's helping them. I got some e-mails from Aaron, an 8 year old kid from the States who is interested in programming :)

So now that creating videos has become quite automatic, it's time for a new challenge that starts tomorrow. I will do some adjustments in my life and stick with them during October. And they will bring positive changes :)

Thoughts, early 21st century

BarCamp Tampere

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