The primary goal was to establish links in Barbados, the approach was to mix free meetups with paid workshops. Many many thanks to +Shannon Clarke and +Jason Hynds for helping to make things happen on the ground. We started with an informal meetup on Monday at the Courtyard Marriot. The other events were held at the Barbados Coalition of Service Industries.
The paid workshop went well and I received overwhelmingly positive feedback, confirming the value that the Tutorate project is already offering to "knowledge-loving" individuals (practical knowledge at that).
Shannon served as an excellent moderator for all the events, keeping us on schedule and interviewing around the table with questions like "What was your scariest project?". It has got me thinking that there's room for a moderator role for future local events. The workshop was generally conversational with some really smart persons around the table including +Thomas Clarke a veteran developer and director at CyberSea Inc. Thomas' repertoire ranges from Cobol in his early days all the way through to Scala and Flask and JQuery now.
Our schedule was as follows:
- Monday Jan 28, 2013 - A meetup at the Courtyard Marriot with some of the up and coming software development talent in Barbados.
- Tueday Jan 29, 2013 - A dev-evening at BCSI where developers shared what they were working on including an enlightening tutorial from +Jason Als on AngularJS and NodeJS.
- Wednesday Jan 30, 2013 - A Tutorate - App Development Fundamentals workshop that gave a tour of DustJS, JQuery, Dotcloud and supporting technologies.
Due to scheduling issues the Websites on a Budget workshop was cancelled. Looking forward to running that one soon, appropriately this trip ended up being for the technological pioneers. I'm hoping that the next trip to Barbados will allow a chance to provide tutorials to the small business sector.
It was a great time and certainly an opportunity to make tech meetups happen on a more regular basis in Barbados. Let's plan more carefully for the next time you're here.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback Shannon. Fully agree with the more planning thought.
ReplyDeleteThings were quite ad-hoc. I consider it to be the rough "experiment". Based on the results I'm excited about what could happen with more lead time and planning.