Geekcamp Rewind and Review

Disclosure, the author of this post is also the organizer of GeekcampSG

GeekcampSG, one of the fastest growing local community driven events, took place last Saturday (August 18th), and saw over 200 geeks turn up in the morning with more streaming in throughout the rest of the day. Within a span of 10 minutes, all 100 shirts were given out to the first 100 attendees.

Image credit: SGE

For the uninitiated, GeekcampSG is a community driven event where members of the volunteer topics that they are interested in speaking about, and the rest of the community will vote on the talks they want to listen to. The process lasts around two months, before the organizers will schedule all the talks. And then the event happens.

This year’s keynote, by U-Zyn Chua, received more than 90 votes, and was on how bitcoins were safer than using banks. In his 30-minute keynote, he explained how bitcoins work, and all the underlying technical implementations that resulted in the Bitcoin system. It was followed by Justin Lee’s talk on HTML5 architecture, and Bhagaban Behera’s talk on a cool new piece of technology, node.js.

After the lunch break, the talks resumed with two tracks, and covered various topics, including security on iOS apps, Lisp, graph databases as well as a special talk this year by the younglings on what they are hacking around with.

At the end of the day, the participants ended up at Nueva Cuba for their after-party, with food and drinks courtesy of the sponsors of GeekcampSG.

If this is an event you see yourself interested in, do check them out on GeekcampSG on Facebook or Twitter for up-to-date news on the next GeekcampSG. Slides from this year’s talk can be found here.

The organizers would also like to take this opportunity to thank Windows Azure (where a free three months trial is available), iDA, Softlayer (startups can use the coupon code: SNGCLOUD01), and Paypal for their support.