Out of the way

Bar Camp, for those who don't know, is an "un-conference". People get together to talk about stuff (generally web technology). The first BarCamp in Central Asia was [url]organised by a gang of people but special thanks go to Бектур, Кристина, и Ринат (Bektour, Cristina and Rinat) for an incredible effort, meeting people at the airport early in the morning (really early - 4 am...) and running around all day, translating for the handful of us who didn't speak Russian, and generally being stars and wonderful people.

I met lots of other great people. Those of you who can read russian (or Ukranian? I cannot tell the difference by looking) might want to check out some blog posts by Vladimir (including a couple of photos of Eva giving a presentation, although she originally came just for a holiday). There are a lot of photos on Rashad's blog and a link to his presentation on mobile web that I tried to follow. But I couldn't really. Rinat gave me a summary as we were leaving, that showed I hadn't understood much at all I think the commentary on his blog is in Azeri, just to make it even harder for me, although he mixes Russian and English in his slides, which are helpful. There is a Flickr pool, so far consisting of a couple of hundred photos with captions from Yelena "Mursya" Jetpyspayeva. Maybe Miel will add her photos there. There are some videos, including a whole collection of people talking about why they are at BarCamp. Eva and I each did one in English, but most of the rest are in Russian.

I learned a bit more Russian, and a couple of words in Kyrgyz (I think "thank you" is written рахмат but I could be way off), and about reading cursive Russian for real, where the T looks like M and the U is really an I. I stayed in a hotel where you could see snowy mountain caps close by, if you could sit on the balcony in the 36 degree heat. I tried local food and local drinks, and found I liked them. I didn't get asked to try watermelon, although they are everywhere and look like good ones (and I am told they are by people who are mistaken, thinking that watermelon is a food. They are wrong. Watermelon is not a food, it just pretends to be one to trick people).

The event itself was very impressive. People came from Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Poland, as well as at least one from Italy, Spain, the USA, Azerbaijan. I think there were other countries, but it is hard to remember everything now. There was a day of normal presentations, with three tracks filled nicely, and a day with an innovation incubator session (Marcin came from the Soros foundation to help people figure out how to build good projects) that also had a "BridgeCamp" session - people posted questions, and others volunteered answers (thanks Daniel for answering my question, and Eva for giving a full talk for the question I volunteered to answer). As a result of discussion at dinner time, there was also a lightning talks session.

I like lightning talks. Giving a talk on a new technology in 3 minutes is tricky but fun. At Xtech I had 6 minutes to speak about Opera Dragonfly (congratulations to Alexander Kim for knowing it already, and wining one of the rare Opera T-shirts made in the Kyrgyz Republic), in the 20/20 format (20 slides, 20 seconds each. It was even trickier to do a demo, with no projector. And this is the first time I have had to do it with a translation being interspersed - thanks Rinat for doing a great job of that, giving me most of my time to speak.

I also gave a talk about Web standards and the new video / 3D canvas / etc build as I wrote earlier, and I will post a pointer to the slides and stuff by and by (they are not online yet and I am going on holidays a while ago). Thanks to Uliana for translating a talk that was nothing like either the practice one we did or the original draft I showed her.

Thanks to Eva for coming, and participating, and learning to order два пива and say спасибо, to everyone I sat and talked with and everyone who listened to me, to Жнвое пиво for sponsoring the opening party and giving me a T-shirt, to Volodya for the Vodka and the company, to everyone who gave us gifts, to the people who spoke spanish or french or english with us or helped with words and phrases in Russian, to everyone who helped translate stuff. Thanks to Opera for sponsoring the event, and sending me there

I really hope that I will be at the next Bar Camp in Central Asia - as well as all the people I want to see again, there are a lot of things I didn't see, yet.