Story of a BarCamp
So last week happened, and it was…awesome!
Gladly invited by the OpenPaas (OP) Team, me and a couple of other guy from the LinShare team were on-board for our first BarCamp ever (Yay!). So let’s review together how it happened and if we liked it (spoiler alert: we did!).
The Context
Being a smaller team than OP and closer in term of proximity, the idea of BarCamp picked our interest but we never took the time to organize one nor to find idea well suited for the different skilled people composing our team. So, when OP asked us to participate, we were of course interested and glad to work with new people on new topics.
The Place
Agde, quite a nice place in the south of France, even if it is pretty hot at this time of the year. But the most amazing was the house.
- Big — for 10 people.
- Well equipped — pool, hot tub, BBQ, Big TV for pair/mob programming .(#PPRProgramming)
- Close to the sea — less than one km away.
Perfect condition for a team of people overloading with crazy way of programming.
The People
It’s nice to get to know new people and to put a face on a chat username, and not wondering if they really are people or just some crazy chat-bot. Let me sum up some really good stuff about working with someone new, someone skilled:
- Live learning — despite working on the same Job & language (JavaScript), there is still some differences that you might learn from the simplest to the craziest, to all kind of stuff (IDE, Tools, Algorithm, …).
- Change the air — bringing new people change the dynamic of your daily workplace, challenge you in some way, in a good way.
- Discover their project — yes of course we work in the same company but we all have our project, and discovering what’s inside, the how and the why is interesting and can make you re-think of some aspect of yours.
The Topics
For this, we got lucky, the different subjects were trendy and interesting, might not be the case for every BarCamp as I have heard.
- Desktop app with electron —composed of two subjects, making OpenPaas run as desktop app and use the integrated component of the OS for a better user interaction, see those two posts about it: building-a-desktop-openpaas-application & desktop-app-under-the-sun.
- Offline mode — making OpenPaas work even under the subway tunnel, quite nice right? Caching REST calls when offline .
What’s more?
All of us OpenPaas & LinShare team were really glad of this BarCamp/Meetup and some really connected, for example myself who got hooked on spacemacs ;).
Definitely, this is something to experience. There is not of course only pros but the cons were so minimal that it was not worth mentioning them (except maybe for the damn mosquitos!).
Now it’s our turn to make one and we will be sure to have some guest as well, maybe next time from another company, who knows?
