BarCamp Blackpool
Yesterday, the second BarCamp Blackpool took place at the Pleasure Beach. It was an absolutely amazing event – everyone was really friendly, it was great to catch up with people I haven’t seen in a while and I met some interesting new people too!
The location was really really good. It all took place in the Paradise Room inside that big white building at the Pleasure Beach. During the day the room was partitioned off into three smaller rooms where talks could take place. Additionally, there were little booths around the back with tables and power, and you could alternatively lurk there at the back during a session (or between them) to chat or code 
. At night, the partitions were removed and we were treated to a sponsored bar (courtesy of @Plip) and buffet (sponsored by PayPal). There was also magic by Paul Sylvester – Josh’s dad – which was awesome and really funny. (Miles better than Ken Webster!)
The sessions were really interesting. I enjoyed the Xdebug talk by Ben Waine and he helped me to get it up and running on my MacBook after the talk. I also caught a bit of the next session, a talk on Twitter and TagWalk by Tim Hastings. In the afternoon, I caught the end of Jon Spriggs’ talk on the digital session board script he’d created. It’s a nice idea, but I think for the script to be really useful, the concept needs refining (especially in room allocation etc), the barrier to entry lowered and I’d like to see an API. Finally I went to Jeremy Coates‘ talk on using a Continuous Integration system like Hudson with Phing to automatically run unit tests, check code styles and run code through phpDocumentor, ready for deployment.
After the sessions were finished, we had an hour to kill, so many of us all followed @Thehodge around and around the building until we found the Horror Bar (hidden down some unmarked stairs past some toilets). Definately some interesting things down there, including a zebra skeleton, and it was quite funny watching (and cheering) all the people running out of the horror walkthrough accompanied by the chainsaw sound effect!
(Almost forgot about the awesome pie at lunch! Meat and potato ftw 
)
There’s no doubt this was a spot-on event. Everything was ran well and it was really enjoyable. A massive thanks to Gemma Cameron for organising it and thanks to all the sponsors and all the attendees for helping to make it happen! Roll on BarCamp Blackpool 3!