Alright, so you're pretty down with the tech scene. You've gone to more BarCamps than you care to list, have a few WordCamps under your belt, maybe a Startup Weekend or two, and perhaps a SuperHappyDevHouse here and there. Maybe you've been to the invite-only Foo Camp if you're all kinds of special. But have you been to an O'Reilly Ignite event yet? Until this past Thursday, I hadn't. That's when Atlanta held its first Ignite and I can say without a doubt that it went off without a hitch. I don't know what the official count was, but the event had close to 500 RSVPs.
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.
As the quote from O'Reilly's site above states, Ignite is all about getting people to come together to share their hobbies, projects, thoughts, whatever, in an interesting 20 slide, 15 second per slide format. There were 18 speakers at this IgniteATL that was held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Midtown Atlanta. Organizer Colin Ake convinced me to present something. I was originally going to do a talk on something blog related, but after reading more about Ignite and seeing how it was more about people not talking about their main line of work, I ended up doing a talk entitled "HDR Imaging for n00bs."
The main room. There was an "overflow" room that had the audio and video as well.
Other talks covered a variety of topics like space, hydrogen, computer overclocking, art, beer, biology and business.
Me yammering on about HDR Imaging.
Below are my slides and a video of my talk (thanks for recording Ivan!). Watch at your own risk..
Hats off to the organizers, Atlanta's first Ignite night was a blast and I'm eager to see what kind of talks spring up at the next one.
My Ignite presentation. I don't make for the best speaker, that's for sure. :-D
Have you been to any such Ignite nights or similar events? What did you think of it? Props to Nathan Fowler for letting me use some of his great pics of IgniteATL. This was the first time I used Keynote to make a presentation and it was a delight. Stammy approved.
Unrelated: I'll be at WordCamp Birmingham later this month as Skribit is a sponsor.