Summercamp: One year on

This time last year, I was lucky enough to be at Summercamp down at the Carsonified offices in Bath and thought I’d write an update of the things that have happened in the last year and how the event has helped me in the last 12 months. Summercamp was billed as an event aimed at full-time students and founders of startup web apps who were just starting out. Places were limited to 8 only and as there was only three weeks between the event being announced and the event itself, I applied immediately and to be honest, kind of forgot about it as I didn’t really believe that I would be accepted. I was delighted however when Trista got in touch to say that I had been awarded a place.

As well as myself, the other attendees were:

• James Proud (founder of Gig Locator)
• Jonathan Dalrymple
• Rob Day
• Matt Dempsey
• Felix Rennicks
• Amaury Moulron
• Ross Bearman

Across the 8 of us were a wide range of skills and talents, with Gig Locator being in beta at the time and has since launched and doing well, and Rob was organising a one-day conference called Tomorrow’s Web which took place just a few weeks after Summercamp. There was a mix of designers and developers across the attendees and the sessions were also evenly spread between design, development and business/career issues, all of which were interesting in their own. Full write ups on the event are available her with part 1 and part 2.

In the 12 months since, things have changed a lot for me as I am no longer at university and am now in full-time employment and have also improved both my design and development skills over the last year. My own website has been re-designed several times since and have also learned more coding skills, focussing on HTML5 and CSS 3 and even dabbling in php!

As more of a designer than developer I was more interested with the design focussed talks and I thoroughly enjoyed Mike‘s talk through on what was then the recent Carsonified re-design and how he approached it. I also enjoyed the talks on development techniques and how to approach the task of building and testing sites, with Ryan‘s introduction to A/B testing being an interesting session.

The whole experience was brilliant and if Carsonified were to ever run it again, I would recommend to anyone to apply for a place. I’ve benefitted greatly from the experience (even playing Wiffle Ball!) and I’m sure all the other guys have gained a lot from it also.