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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.

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.

Last week Couch Surfers (from around the world) gathered in Beijing, China at Beihai Park (北海公园) to celebrate International Couch Surfing Day. Although the weather was sub-optimal at first, we had a pretty strong turnout. We met at noon for a potluck picnic in the Long Corridor. We spent the afternoon chatting about travel, life, philosophy, trust, Couch Surfing, Beijing, and more. After the picnic we made a "Got Couch?" poster and took some photos around the park. My favorite group shot was taken by Alain at the White Pagoda. We spend the rest of our time in the park tossing around a football and playing Jianzi (毽子). After the park we went to a Mexican restaurant in Sanlitun (三里屯) for dinner. People came and went throughout the day, all in all we had 18 people attend.

If you have any photos from this event, please share them.

Check out my photos and the photos by others.

Attendees (in no particular order):

Pete
Paul
Sara
Nicole
John
Trevor
Chao
Alain
Mel
Motegi
Sunflower
Katrina & Daniel
Ines
Marc
Nick
Colvin
Jenny