On Saturday, I spent the day at BarCampDC2.    Like last year there were plenty of great sessions.  I really wanted to discuss Amazon's EC2 as I think it is where most small companies should be moving their sites and I see huge business opportunities in this space.   As the session board was being built I kept looking for something on Amazon's EC2, S3 or AWS.  I had not used the services yet, but I was determined to discuss them as I know many of the companies present were using them.   In desperation, I grabbed a pen and a post it note and wrote "To Cloud or Not? AWS, EC2, S3 or build your own".   I owned the session and I hoped I would have a few experts in the room so I could act as a moderator instead of presenter.

The room was packed and I started out by telling everyone that I had no presentation or experience with these technologies and hoped we had some experts in the room.   As I expected there were plenty of experts in the room and we had a great discussion on what Amazon had to offer and other offerings that companies can leverage.

The room was filled with some of the greatest minds from the DC Tech scene.

More pics are here.

My notes from the session are here. Nikolas Coukouma helped clean them up and added some additional pointers.  

After my session I attended several hard core geek sessions, as usual there were many sessions I was unable to attend.   Maybe we can videotape the sessions next time?
I attended

• 11AM - Nitrogen Web Framework
• 1PM - Git
• 2PM - MySQL Optimization
• 3PM-5PM wandered through various sessions.
• 5PM - Beer!   Great presentation by Chris Williams.   I thought this was an early happy hour room but instead Chris schooled us on the history of beer.

Afterward we headed to McFadden's where I consumed several pints of  Guinness.   Fortunately I had taken the bus and metro from my house so getting home was a non-issue.

Thanks to Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University for letting us have the conference there and thanks to all the folks that helped put this together.   Can we do this again in 6 months?  :-)