BarCamp Melbourne : 60 people, 25 talks and an amazing day of interdisciplinary cahoots unorganized by Ben Balbo ! What I loved about BarCamp:http://barcamp.org/ was the range of presentations – everything from programming, databases and information modelling through to media centers, industrial relations, social activities and a hell of a lot of fun.

I’d like to give special mention to Paul Fenwick’s hilarious and poignant talk on “An Illustrated History of Failure”. He managed to show why testing costs – and quantified it. It was a showcase of brilliant execution on a topic which would, with an average presenter, make you groan.

Other outstanding talks where Andy G’s “OpenLazlo GUI, jiggy itouch GUI, openmaji” and Brent Snook’s “Lowering Usability Hurdles with the Wii”. Very, very cool stuff. In reality all the talks were excellent and had a lot to offer. I can’t wait to see the what the next BarCamp has to offer.

I was lucky enough to win a copy of The CSS Anthology from SitePoint:http://sitepoint.com/ for my talk on Monkey Patching (which I’d given previously as the Ruby Nuby night a few months ago). The after event drinks were in North Melbourne, with the suds provided by Microsoft

You can keep up with the activities on by checking out the BarCampMelbourne2008 tag on da internets .