Five and Lime

Here are my slides from my talk at BathCamp 2008. I thought I only had about 15 minutes so didn’t include any code examples. In the end slots for 40 minutes so I could have gone into more detail. That said it seemed to work quite well and a good discussion followed my brief set of slides.

BathCamp was my first experience of a BarCamp/UnConference event and I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately child care commitments meant I was unable to stay past 5pm so I missed a couple of talks I was really interested in, in particular “How to build a web app in 5 days” and @bealers “Tub Quiz”. Next time!

So here are my 10 reasons I think you should give Django a spin.

You can comment over on Slideshare too if you prefer. Thanks.

Today sees the first ever BarCamp in Bath, cleverly titled BathCamp. Props to Mike Ellis and co for organising the event. Carsonified are sponsoring breakfast so it’s an early doors trip to our local Sainsbury’s for hot pastries and other essential nourishment.

It looks set to be a great day with talks on community building and the prefect espresso to name but two. It’s also a great opportunity to meet “old” friends and make new ones as well as putting twitter names to faces. I have prepared a talk on why you should try Django and will post the slides later today.

Yesterday was the end of an eventful week at Carsonified. We set ourselves the challenge of building a web app in four days. The whole process was blogged over at www.carsonfied.com and the end result is Matt (Multi Account Twitter Tweeter). Essentially it allows you to post the same message to one or many Twitter accounts. It is coded in Python and uses the Django web framework. Hard to believe now but we had little experience of either before the project began but we thought it would be good to see just how agile and easy to use Django is. Personally I was impressed.

The app is in many ways secondary to the experience. The end result showed how a team of people with diverse skills can pull together and achieve something great within a given time period. We can’t have done too bad as the project made it onto TechCrunch and sparked off something of a debate (145 comments at the time of writing). 1200 accounts have been added in the first 24 hours!

Be sure to check out the posts and videos over at www.carsonified.com and futureofwebapps.wordpress.com for more info and to chart the project from day one to four.

On Friday 13th June a bunch of us from Carsonified descended on RIBA in Lonon for our first ever FUEL conference. It was the first time we had run an event with this type of content and I felt it went really well. Despite having to follow the boys form Soocial and their love of Hasslehoff I felt my own talk went well. I got some positive feedback on the day and subsequently which is always nice. It’s always hard to know where to pitch things and I think for some attendees they probably found they knew most of the concepts and appliactions. Hopefully they were in the minority.

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There were some great presentations on the day, the majority of which are now available from the web site. You can also check out some of the tweets from the day using Summize.

Finally a huge thanks to Jean-Baptiste Feldis who came all the way of Paris for the day. He also brought me over a selection of French mustards (a personal fave of mine) which I am currently enjoying. Merci JB!

Over the last few weeks I have been attempting to perfect my home made pizza skills. It all started a couple of weekends ago when the fridge was bare apart from a few vege’s and cheese. The only issue was a distinct lack of yeast. As it turned out this isn’t a problem.

After scouring the web it turns out you can easily rustle up a pizza base with flour, oil, milk and baking powder (all of which were in the cupboard). The recipe I found was in cups but it doesn’t seem to matter, as long as you use the same cup for all measures it seems to work.
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