The Opening Keynote was worthy of capitalization, of course. Now I’m at BarCamp catching up with food and friends and slightly more reliable WiFi.
There were/are two things I’d love to ask Mr. Fried. I totally agree with pretty much all the Getting Real stuff (and if you haven’t bought that book I recommend it for anyone, not just geeks), but have come up against a couple issues that I think are rather common:
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Burnout. “When you have less time you waste less time.” But my problem is after 8-9 hours a day of banging my head against the brick wall of .NET, I don’t have the mental energy to really concentrate on the side job. And don’t just tell me to use RoR was going to be my caveat…and related, what about constraints at our day jobs, like what technology we must use or what political hoops we must jump through? – What I call “bad constraints.” …And how are they able to blog so much?! They mentioned curiosity as the most valuable human asset – but I’m learning my third language and as each have their nuance, strengths, and weaknesses, I’m coming up against my brain’s limit!
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They mentioned being a generalist is a strength as well. But how does one avoid the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none syndrome, which I have been feeling for some time now.
They mentioned failing while in obscurity as a good thing. I’ve certainly done that! I’m just writing my long-standing intention to blog about my numerous business failures of 2004-2005 on underdeconstruction.com (which is currently under severe deconstruction).
Later:
Just attended Chris Messina’s Flock presentation here at BarCamp. Short version: I LIKE. Will probably jump on the dev release as soon as I hear it is stable enough for everyday use.