That John Martin

I wandered over to BarCampSydney on Saturday and it was much more fun and stimulating than I had expected. The number of startups represented was roughly equal to the number of attendees, or so it seemed.

Joel Pobar did a session on Google style scaling. It looks like those guys have put together a slick MapReduce implementation in .NET, all from a garage in Brisbane, no less. I wonder, though, whether it’ll be prohibitive tying a technology such as that to an operating system with a non-zero licensing cost.

Ben Hogan, an old colleague now part of the ThoughtWorks brotherhood, delivered a sermon on agile. I’m still not sold on forced pairing, I tend to defer to Mr Yegge on matters agile, but it was a class presentation, and loads of fun to catch up afterwards.

Mike and Marty gave a talk on all things startup. Marty was good cop, Mike was bad cop. It was loose and interesting and full of anecdotes. The one thing that stuck with me was Mike’s comments about keeping pricing simple. In industries that have complicated pricing structures, a simplified pricing scheme becomes a feature. Possibly even something remarkable, literally. iTunes with 99c songs, all-you-can-eat food and phones and bandwidth, the FreshView guys with email marketing tools at 1c per email. Definitely something to ponder…

More BarCampSydney observations here, here, and here.

The University of Sydney, maker of fine computer scientists, has (sadly) entered into a deal with one of the residential colleges in which the college will renounce rights for some of its land and allow the university to build a new medical research centre with the proviso that it is never used to carry out foetal stem cell research. The agreement doesn’t stop the university from conducting stem cell research elsewhere, which I’m sure it will, but it’s a shitty precedent to set.