On Saturday, a few of us from The Creative Space made it down to Houston for their 2008 BarCamp. I had not been down to Houston for any community/tech events lately and it was really nice to finally get a chance to see folks I hadn’t seen in a while. I would list them all but I’ll save you the time having to read 50 or so names.

Ben gave a presentation on Merb - The Pocket Rocket Web Framework, which was a modified version of the talk he and Brian gave at Austin on Rails recently. Several in his audience had either used or at least heard of Merb, which is always a suprising thing to us considering the newness of the framework. Ben’s talk generated great discussion afterwards.

Roby, of Always Creative fame, followed up with a presentation on Building Better Brands (slideshare). He did an outstanding job and piqued the interest of several in the audience when he took folks through the process for three jobs they had recently done.

Overall, the BarCamp was fun and the community was definitely out in force.

Downtown Cartel, a member company of the Creative Space, was one of the hosts for BarCampTexas. Ben gave a talk on test driven development. A panel of folks from the Creative Space, including our own Cody Marx Bailey, talked about our co-working implementation in beautiful downtown Bryan. All in all, it was a great success. The beer flowed, the talks went late into the night, and a stack of business cards were obtained.

It was really nice to meet a lot of the folks from around the state that do the same kind of stuff we do. I think we surprised a lot of the people that came who had never heard of Bryan/College Station, TX.

We’re busy working on our next event with the Creative Space, but we don’t want to let the cat out of the bag quite yet.

Downtown Cartel and the rest of the Creative Space will be spending the day in Houston on Thursday, January 17. We are coming down to see some of our friends, supporters, and folks we’ve heard about but never met face to face. Here’s how the trip is looking right now:

• Wednesday
  • Leave The Creative Space at 5:30.
  • Arrive in Houston for a delicious dinner (suggestions welcome).
  • Maybe go out for some music/dessert.
  • Head to the hotel downtown.
• Thursday
  • 8am - 10am > Open Coffee Club
  • 10am - 11am > Jelly Coworking Space
  • 11am - 12pm > Houston Technology Center
  • 12pm - 1:30pm > Lunch (suggestions welcome)
  • 1:30pm - 3pm > Pop Labs
  • 3pm - 5pm > Schipul
  • 5:30pm > Dinner

We’re really excited about the trip and hopefully we’ll represent the Bryan tech community well. We’ll be traveling with:

• Always Creative
• Building Process
• Erickson Media Group
• Michael Cummings Photography