I’m writing this from at BarCamp Boston 4. It’s lunch actually, so I have a bit of time to throw a few words down.

The whole concept of a BarCamp (an unConference) is very intriguing. There is no set format, only a scaffolding of session time slots and rooms. What makes BarCamp so special is the participants. Everyone is encouraged to participate, either from organizing a session, or contributing or learning from a session that you attend. Participants create the sessions and run them. Some may be pre-planned, but most are ad-hoc and follow the flow of the audience. The organizer need not be someone wholly knowlegeable either, but rather someone interested in that topic and looking for others with a similar interest. From the BarCamp rules: “Who ever comes, those are the right people. Whatever happens, was what was supposed to happen.”

I’ve only been in two sessions so far; the two pre-lunch sessions. The first session I attended dealt with Git and feature (aka topic) branching, a rather advanced concept which utilizes a branches branch per feature methodology for concurrently developed features that are merged into an integration branch once deemed complete. I found the session interesting, and learned that the presenter is the developer of a wonderful little Ruby application for managing feature-branched repositories: git-wtf.

The second session I went to was lead by a novice iPhone application developer. It wasn’t the most interesting talk, but it was amusing to hear a few stories about developing for the iPhone and attempting to get an application approved to go in Apple’s App Store. He relayed how his search application, Super Search, was rejected when he first submitted it because the tester had searched for c*cksucker and the app dutifully pulled up the Wikipedia page for fellatio. He resubmitted his app, without changing the binary five minutes later, was rejected again, spoke to someone at Apple, and they accepted the app. All without making any changes to the binary from its first submission. It’s similar to the common carrier argument; should the search app be held profane if the user searches for a profane keyword? I think not.

I also had the opportunity to meet Andrew Lewman from the Tor project. I’ve recently been doing some work on a hidden service address generator, named PurpleOnion, and have been mirroring the Tor site at torproj.xpdm.us. He offered me a Tor t-shirt for the work I had done. I have grandiose ideas to turn PurpleOnion into a Mono/.NET managed Tor-compliant onion router; if you’re interested in a .onion address generator, take a look at the PurpleOnion project at Github.

Anyway, lunch is rapping up, and there look to be a few interesting tracks to start off the afternoon. The day has been fun so far. I’ll post more as the day goes on.