As I posted on Sunday night, I participated in the BarCamp Boston 2 programming contest.

Mike Walsh has been gracious enough to edit and host a video of the contest presentations. Many thanks to Mike for his work and to everyone else for making BarCamp Boston 2 a great experience!

Matthew claims that I am a superstar, but it’s really less glamorous.

Part of the BarCamp Boston 2 conference was a programming contest.

During the whole first day, people wrote words on a blackboard. At the end of the day, some 11 words were chosen. From these words participants needed to build software which used at least four.

My entry, Pixels to Penguins was one of about seven different entries from different teams of different sizes. All the presentations were very well done, and all quite light-hearted; a great end to the weekend.

Pixels to Penguins took user input, performed a flickr search for related tags, then performed another flicker API call to find images which matched those related tags. The images were mapped onto an ASCII-art rendering of Tux, the Linux penguin; JavaScript made these images appear gradually. To accompany this beautiful scene, all of the data was converted into an integer stream and a 4-track MIDI file was generated. What beautiful music!

The judges named Pixels to Penguins the winning contest entry. The top two teams (three of us in total) won a helicopter ride with Phil Greenspun. I’ve never been in a helicopter!

The (Ruby on Rails) code for Pixels to Penguins is here. I’ve found that it works best under the FireFox browser. My presentation is here.

Update: I’ve had reports that this hack hangs some browsers, so buyer beware. I have been using it successfully on Firefox/MacOSX, but Safari hangs. Firefox/Windows seems to also have problems. If you figure it out, please add a comment to this post!

Update2 I think the browser hangs have been resolved. I was toggling visibility by altering opacity from 0 to 1. A number of browsers were not happy with so much opacity changing so quickly. Now, I’m simply changing the visibility CSS attribute. Please let me know if you still experience troubles with my Pixels to Penguins hack. (Really, it’s nothing more than a cute hack.)

First I want to say thank you to everyone who put together and paid for Boston BarCamp 2. I know that it’s billed as “organized on the fly by attendees” and I know many people chipped in a few dollars, but a small group of generous and hard working folks shouldered most of the load.

This was my first BarCamp and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, and I’d have to describe my experience as mixed, but positive overall.

I only attended the Saturday sessions. Sunday’s agenda had very little that appealled to me and I didn’t want to make the trip over to MIT. However, I could have stepped up and presented something, and chose not to. I’ve been to many a $800 conference with a dead day on the schedule and felt angry at the loss of my time, so I don’t actually count this against the unconference.

The quality of the sessions I attended on Saturday was mixed, but at BarCamp you can get up and walk to another session, which I did. Some were downright excellent. (Many of the sessions discussed financing startups. It would be interesting to see folks from the venture community show up at the next one and host a talk.)

There was lots of conversation in the hall and over coffee and lunch. I don’t know if that is a function of the event’s size, the nature of the attendees, or both.

So overall, it was a good experience. I’ll very likely be at the next one. I came away having learned more about some subjects than I expected, received pointers to interest and opportunities, and met (and re-met!) some new people. Not a bad return on a few dollars and a few hours!

(Aron attended both days and became a big star! He will be posting presently.)

Aron and I will be at BarCamp Boston 2 this weekend over at MIT. We’re looking forward to meeting and talking with people from the surrounding area about things like Ruby on Rails, user interface design, information architecture, or whatever. I’m sure we’ll end up giving a few impromptu demos as well.

Don’t let the snow scare you away and we’ll see you there!