www.johndbritton.com

This past Saturday was Barcamp Hong Kong (photos). If you've never heard of Barcamp you should check out the Wikipedia article. The event was organized by technologists from the area and was hosted by Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. at their location in Quarry Bay.

There were five rooms available during each of six time slots for a total of 30 possible sessions. I attended six:

• Online Marketing for Consumer Acquisition
• Technology Yesterday, Relevance
• Making iPhone Apps
• Open Culture
• Just What the ____ is SPAM?
• Theming Drupal

I organized the session on Open Culture, and was very happy at the amount of discussion and participation we had. Most of the other sessions were more like lectures but still quite good. The interactivity was mostly thanks to Conrad Benham's idea to make the session an "open space" discussion, it seemed to fit perfectly with the topic. We placed five "hot seats" at the front of the room. To control conversation, only people seated in the designated seats were allowed to talk. Anyone could join the conversation by bumping another person off the floor. The discussion mostly focused on open education and it's practical application, but we hit a few other topics as well.

There were more than 25 Drupalistas at Barcamp HK. It was quite funny to bump into Dave Hansen-Lange from Advomatic again, I met him earlier this year on the other side of the planet at Drupalcon Boston. I took the first few minutes of the "Theming Drupal" session to talk about the Knight Drupal Initiative and answer questions related to the grant process before the other talk begain. There was quite a bit of interest in KDI; let's see those proposals!

After the conference ThoughtWorks and others sponsored a gathering at the East End Brewery.

Many thanks to everyone for such an enlightening day.

About a week ago I announced an Olympic Ticket Giveaway. The time has come to announce the winners and runners-up. Although there is no way for me to verify you've done your good deed, I hope that you will follow through even if you didn't win the tickets.

There was a great response, with even better ideas:

• Pray for peace on Earth
• Organize a Couch Surfing gathering
• Give art lessons to friends and family
• Give up metro seats
• Make people smile
• Give English lessons to Japanese speakers
• Organize a fundraiser for the Join Together Society
• Sponsor a Sichuan child
• Help economically depressed municipalities start businesses
• Give technical help
• Spread happiness
• Volunteer at Chinese orphanages
• Be extra nice to the boyfriend
• Organize kids sporting events
• Donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Lower carbon footprint by using mass transit more
• Do the right thing

I'd like to give a special thank you to everyone who helped spread the word about this giveaway, especially the following:

• Kirsty from NerdyNomad
• Jason from GOOD Magazine
• Christine from Almost Fearless
• Julie from Matador Pulse

And without further adieu...

Winners:

• Joseph (good deed)
• Imran (good deed)
• Saurabh (good deed)

Runners-up

• A. Yellis (good deed)
• Anonymous (good deed)
• TKC (good deed)

Winners have 24 hours to contact me to claim their tickets, unclaimed tickets will be awarded to runners-up.

UPDATE: This giveaway has ended, see the results.

I have a surplus of tickets to the Olympics; rather than scalp them for crazy prices I've decided to give them away free of charge. There are three pairs of tickets available (six tickets total).

The tickets are for Equestrian Events in Hong Kong (A Class) to take place on August 9, 2008. The events will be held at the Sha Tin Racecourse (accessible via KCR).

You don't have to pay me back, but there is a slight catch. I expect you to "pay it forward" by doing a good deed, any good deed.

The tickets are available to anyone, really, anyone... that means you! All you have to do is leave a comment on this post describing the good deed you will do. Be creative, have fun and make sure the good deed is not directed toward me (that would defeat the idea of this pseudo-contest).

I will select three winners and three runners-up on August 6, 2008 and notify them via email. In the event that any of the winners is unable to attend or is unreachable by August 7, 2008 the tickets will be passed down to the runners-up.

Also, please be sure to give a valid email address (it won't be published) so I can contact you if you win.

If you're short on ideas for good deeds here are a few suggestions:

• Make a micro-loan on Kiva
• Host a foreign traveler from CouchSurfing
• Help an old lady cross the street
• Give some free hugs
• Subscribe to Good Magazine, or better yet buy a friend a subscription
• Practice other random acts of kindness

Rules:

• Each entrant can win at most one pair of tickets
• Winners have 24 hours to claim tickets
• Runners-up have 24 additional hours to claim tickets
• All decisions are final

This past Tuesday evening Chris Stevenson gave a talk on Continuous Integration at the ThoughtWorks Hong Kong office as part of the Agile Hong Kong series.

The event started off with a short explanation of what Continuous Integration is, citing Martin Fowler's authoritative article. He has written a number of software development books focused on design and has held the title of 'Chief Scientist' at ThoughtWorks since 2000.

During his talk Chris stressed that "Continuous Integration is not a tool, it is a software development process." He hit four major points: revision control, automated testing, automated building, and automated deployment. The idea is integrate as often as possible and check in after completing the smallest testable functionality. Automated builds and tests ensure successful integrations and detect problems while they are still manageable, enabling the product to be automatically deployed.

The talk was followed by a short demo of Cruise, ThoughtWorks' management software to be released next week. It is based upon the open and freely available Cruise Control.

Here's an excerpt from the Cruise website

Cruise is a continuous integration and release management system that enables teams to quickly and confidently release their code from development to production. It provides visibility into the deployment pipeline, allowing new builds to be tested in automated or manual steps in staging environments. The result is lower risk when deploying, fewer production defects, faster release cycles, and empowered teams.

Here are a few photos from the event.

Thanks to Chris and Conrad from ThoughtWorks for hosting the session, I'm looking forward to future events.