Barcamp Southampton 2016

If you've never been to a barcamp, it's certainly worth looking into. Nowadays they seem few and far between, but Southampton's is still going strong. I popped along on Saturday to this year's event and there was a wide variety to take in.

From progressive enhancement all the way to presentation skills, there was much to take in. Sadly you can't go to all talks, but here's just a taster of those I managed to get to.

Chatting with Owls

The audience for Barcamp is a geeky one, but young and old are encouraged to come along and talk about what they're passionate about.

Faith came along and showed off her chatbot she built with the help of her sister and dad. By asking it a few questions about owls, we all learned more about owls than we were expecting that day.

The process of creating a chatbot is quite involved and Faith outlined her process and how they got things like speech recognition and natural language to work, which is always good.

The problem with education

Then there was a quick talk from Martin Reid from Solent Uni about fixing technology education in academia. He went through the problems, outlined what approaches they've tried and then opened the floor to discussion.

Now I'm certainly not an expert in these things, but that's what Barcamp is all about - finding out about things you never would otherwise. Some good ideas flying around, with live briefs and alternate forms of grading taking centre stage.

Papers through the ages

Sean took us through their process at the Financial Times for digitising archived content. Through the help on some scanning, some machine learning and a little bit of ad-block mischief, they are able to increase the accuracy of the digitised content.

One part I was a particular fan of was using ad-block detection technology to get readers to pay with man-power rather than money. In a process similar to Google's CAPTCHA system, articles would then be unlocked if they typed out what was in a small piece of scanned content. Readers get free access to content, the FT get more accurate transcribing of old content. It's a win-win.

Lightning talks

Finally, the day signs off with a round of 10 minute lightning talks for those smaller topics.

There was plenty being talked about. On one end of the spectrum you've got a guy coming up talking through his favourite command line entries and on the other a brief primer on the Japanese language. Variety is the spice of life I guess.

I gave a small talk, in fact. It was all about the Payment Request API, which you'll be able to read more about in December's Web Designer Magazine. I haven't gotten round to doing a Barcamp talk since Barcamp Bournemouth 5, so it was great to give it another go.

All in all, great fun as always. Even if it meant an early start on a Saturday morning. I can suffer for it afterwards.