Bar Camp Stanford

I'm late in posting it, but I spent most of last weekend geeking out with a lot of great people at Bar Camp Stanford.

Bar Camp was founded by Chris Messina as a response to O'Reilly's Foo Camp. Wikipedia has a good description of Bar Camp; basically, lots of geeks get together to kibitz, present, organize, and hack. It's very similar to SuperHappyDevHouse.

It was a blast. Granted, it was crazy disorganized, but that's kind of the point. Among other people, I got to hang out with Dan Meredith, Todd Davies, Pete Kazanjy, Jonathan Dugan, Adam Tolnay, James Littlejohn, and Tantek Çelik, most of whom I met for the first time.

I also gave a short talk, Scaling Data on the Cheap. It was a crash course on sharding, or using multiple database masters with mirrored schemas, usually onMySQL or PostgreSQL, as a technique for handling data volume and growth. The crowd grokked it, and had lots of good questions.

Plus, we got to ride the Busycle! Can't beat that with a bat.