mini #barcamp at @MOZO_BKK report, share the fun

Yesterday we had mini barcamp at our office, it was first time  for us, even then everybody spoke something, i was so glad about it.

We copied google’s 20% rule, everybody can spend 20% of their working time for their private projects. But we haven’t done any reporting session yet, so I just setup reporting party like barcamp.

Actually, it was not really proper barcamp style, we didn’t vote. Because we have only few staff and time is limited, we had 2 hours only. We did lightning talks first, and everybody talked overview of their topics. Most of MOZO team members can speak English fine, but some are not, also guys from MOZO Tokyo don’t speak much English. Some of us are not much talkative, but they did speak, tried to explain, others helped, shared stuff, sooooooooooo glad!

Here are some topics from MOZO team, if anybody found any misunderstanding of my report, please let me know.

Introduction Arduino to Flash communications by @visioncoding

Arduino is a controller which lets you to control hardware via applications. As @visioncoding is an ActionScript guy, he wants to use this with Flash. It lets you to control robots from Flash based UI, which could be graphical and also quicker than Java or C++.

Arduino is a controller, so it also let you to control application from a hardware. It works both way. If you have nunchuk, you can develop Flash based physical game using nunchuk :D cool.

He ordered Arduino and getting it in few days. He’s gonna make something in few weeks, then will report us again, as he said :D His website is here : visioncoding.com

HDR techniques by @tomorrowart

@tomorrowart is a designer, he showed us some design tips which we can do quick on photoshop. One of them were about HDR, High Dynamic Range Imaging.

What you have to prepare are 3 images, one is normal photo, one use over-lighted and another one is under-lighted. Convert them using Photoshop function.

easy but cool :)

Tutorial Kingcrow by @tomorrowart

Here is another one by @tomorrowart, it’s also about photoshop tutorial, using free images and make cool photo images. He was inspired by an artist called …. who was it? I thought it was a Spanish artist.

You can see detailed tutorial here.

Facebook with PHP by Lee

He just started playing with Facebook development. He talked about the basic stuff of Facebook application development.

Facebook has API – of course, and also have own markup language called FBML. For myself, markup languages are more familiar, so it was interesting for me. FBML is like this.

<fb:profile-pic uid="12345" linked="true" />
<fb:profile-pic uid="12345" facebook-logo="true" linked="false" width="300" height="400"></fb:profile-pic>
<fb:profile-pic uid="12345" width="32" height="32" linked="true" />

Interesting, seems like it’s not so complicated.

Art of SEO by P’Ake

Half of our team is not very “web” people, they are programmers, not really specified for “web”, so it was kind of thing good to share with everybody.

Sometimes HTML written by a high skilled programmer makes me feel sick. How come? He is such a good programmer and write neat code, how come his html could be so ugly? Well… these are different stuff.

Also when I think about SEO, my point of view is still stuck on “neat and clearn” code, and also interesting contents. I should see more from marketing point of view. There are many techniques which helps for SEO. To make money from your website, SEO is super important.

P’Ake is not a programmer, he’s more web guy, and writing neat html for other programmers :) He is one of the first member of MOZO, and the one I’ve met on my first day in Thailand 6 years back.

It was fun :-)

Anyway, it was our first try, and as the first one, it was not bad. I was little worried about that there could be some people won’t participate, just listen to others and won’t share, but I didn’t have to worried about it at all. Everybody – well except the accounting girl – had own topics to talk, and talked in front of others.

Our 20% rule just started few months ago. The points of doing this are, first, I want my team to be creative and productive, want them to work on what they want. Second, keep team 80% would help company if anything urgent comes up, we don’t have to work 120%, just go 100%.

We’ll do this again, maybe on January to see more progress of their 20% projects, and for fun :)

Sadly, 2 of my team were taking sick leave, I knew both of them have been working on their own projects, we’ll see them at the next one.

Does anybody interested in joining us? Then we can do this little bigger and more like proper sessions :D