Fwd: O'Reilly invites you to Mashed 2008

[Dave Cross]

Quoting David Cantrell <david at cantrell.org.uk>:

> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 09:10:08AM +0100, Dave Cross wrote:
>> Quoting Dave Cross <dave at dave.org.uk>:
>> >Let's fill Mashed with Perl hackers.

[ time passes ]

>> there are very few Perl mongers attending.
>
> I've got other stuff to do this weekend.
>
> But even if I didn't, I wouldn't be going.  It looks like there's just
> one interesting talk, and all the talks are over in half a day.  What's
> happening in the rest of the time?  The website doesn't say, as far as I
> can tell.

That's true. The web sire does rather assume that you already know  
what it's all about. And I suppose that's knowledge that you're  
supposed to have picked up from being on the BBC Backstage mailing list.

That's certainly an area where the organisers could do better, I agree.

> A bit of digging indicates that it's a hackathon where participants are
> expected to work on things that I have no interest in,

Well, you're wrong there. The idea is to hack on things that you _do_  
have an interest in :-)

>                                                        and to stay up
> all night doing it.

Bugger that. I'll be at home in bed overnight.

>                     Perhaps it might get filled with perl hackers if it
> wasn't all about "web 2.0" shite and had a sensible schedule.

It's not all '"web 2.0" shite'. It's whatever the attendees want it to  
be about.

This year, the BBC want to encourage a biut more hardware hacking[1].  
There are also a number of other interesting things going on which you  
won't have seen because the web site doesn't contain much information.  
Although there are some hints available if you know where to look[2].

Dave...

[1] http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/news/archives/2008/06/mashed_electron.html
[2] http://mashed08.backnetwork.com/feeds/