2006-09-03_2

### Bar Camp Stanford

[![bar camp stanford](/space/barcamp_stanford.gif)](http://barcamp.org/BarCampStanford)

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](http://barcamp.org/BarCampStanford).

[Bar Camp](http://barcamp.org/) was founded by
[Chris Messina](http://factoryjoe.com/blog/) as a response to
[O'Reilly](http://oreillynet.com/)'s
[Foo Camp](http://wiki.oreillynet.com/foocamp05/index.cgi).
Wikipedia has a
[good description of Bar Camp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_camp);
basically, lots of geeks get together to kibitz, present, organize, and hack.
It's very similar to [SuperHappyDevHouse](http://superhappydevhouse.org/).

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](http://kodiak.brainymonkey.com/),
[Todd Davies](http://www.stanford.edu/~davies/),
[Pete Kazanjy](http://www.friendster.com/1518179),
[Jonathan Dugan](http://biocontact.org/),
[Adam Tolnay](http://rdvp.org/fellows/2006-2007/adam-tolnay/),
[James Littlejohn](http://www.aboynejames.co.uk/), and
[Tantek Çelik](http://tantek.com/), most of whom I met for the first time.

I also gave a short talk,
[Scaling Data on the Cheap](/space/scaling_data_on_the_cheap.html).
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](http://www.busycle.com/)! Can't beat that
with a bat.