WebCamp KL WebCamp KL

What do they say be careful what we wished for? Indeed we are in a big surprise when roughly 150 people showed up for the event and have outgrown the hall that we've started Webcamp from!

All we can say is: Thanks for making Webcamp KL a smash! We w...

Finally! We are hitting mainstream!

Webcamp KL was featured on BFM Radio today with an interview of the organizers, Wu Han and Seh Hui. During the show, we talk about how Webcamp KL got started, what makes Webcamp valuable and our mission to nurture a community of great people who are passionate about technology.

Two of our sister groups are also highlighted during the show: Educamp KL and MyCocoaHeads.

Check out the full interview below!



(Source: BFM Radio – TechTalk: Webcamp KL)

As luck has it, we had our Webcamp during Diwali: a festival of lights celebrated by the Indian community. While we do miss our fair share of murukku, we have a great lineup of speakers who were kind enough to spend time with us and share their expertise:

Yam Tong Woo – My Blind Sight: How Technology Empowers The Visually Impaired
Patrick Lim, Founder of Greenroom136 – 10 Lessons I've Learned From Project ConcreteJungle Interviewees
Mats Engstrom, CTO of ViA International – Tweet In, Tweet Out
Tristan Gomez, MindValley – Meaningful Metrics
Milad Rastian – Configure and Manage Your Servers in a FLASH with Puppet

Summary
The event kicked off with Yam Tong Woo, a visually impaired automative engineer who lost his sight due to a bacterial infection. With brimming positive energy and enthusiasm, he shared how the Internet and the mobile web transformed and empowered his daily life. During this talk, he presented a live demo on how the visually impaired access the Internet and offers his advice on the current state of assistive technology and issues he faced. As a bonus, he shared his passion for golf and how he's able to continue to play the sport. He currently maintains a blog called My Blind Sight.

The Webcampers were in for a treat as Patrick Lim recorded episode 10 of Project ConcreteJungle podcast live. Check out his talk with lessons he'd learned from the nine highly entrepreneurial guests he had on Project ConcreteJungle, closing with one bonus lesson that involved the common trait he observed from all interviewees. What's the common traits that they had in common? You have to listen in to find out!

Armed with a credit card terminal, Mats Engstrom presented his geeky little side project to make a credit card terminal print live tweets from Twitter. Dig into his adventures of exploring and using the Twitter API and the journey of making the tweet printing credit card terminal. For electronic junkies out there, you know you'd want to make one of these ;).

For business owners out there who's looking into seeing their ROI of their campaigns, we have the perfect talk for you: Tristan Gomez was in the house talking about meaningful metrics – and in 26 minutes he shared about what makes certain data and numbers in your report meaningful, how to craft your metrics and even a case study on how Mindvalley is able to harness its power to track sales and conversions.

Closing the event is Milad Rastian, a sysadmin talking about the importance of tools to automate the heck out of thankless jobs of configuring and managing your servers. In the talk, he shared his experiences in performing the task, open source tools available and specifically talks about he used Puppet to do his job. After all, it great to have fun back in the sysadmin world ;).
Help Wanted
The WCKL team is looking for awesome volunteers to bring Webcamp beyond the confinements of Kuala Lumpur!  If you love what we are doing, ping our Papa Smurf, Wu Han and we'll bring awesomeness to the world!

Help that #WCKL needed:

Networkers to make #WCKL newcomers at home during events :)
Event photographers
Graphic designers to spice up our site (and other promotional swag)
Audio/video editors to make our recordings awesome!
Event planners to organize more *Camps in Malaysia

Photo credit: Anil Wadghule [Source]

What if you bring in all the most active members on the Webcamp KL Facebook group to give talks for the night? One word: EPIC!

Yes, this month we have the all-stars lineup of experts and go on a full-on technical track, topics ranging from Google Analytics to blazing fast web development. Diving into this month's agenda, we have:

Ngeow Wu Han – Keynote: Tribal Leadership
Michal Pietrusinski – Everyone Can Do White-Hat SEO
Leong Seh Hui – Making the WCKL Podcast
Kai Hendry – The Ikiwiki Web Platform
Grey Ang – Blazing Fast Web Development with Jade and Stylus
Arzumy MD — "I, Paul the Octopus"
Brian Ritchie – Analytics on Steriods, Part 1

Summary
A fair warning before listening in: there are a couple of F-bombs and mentions of parts of a reproductive organs being and they are kept in-tact, so if you are easily offended even by mild references, stay away :).

The event kicks off with Wu Han setting the tone for the event by sharing a five-point scale in the book Tribal Leadership, from "My life sucks" to "Life is great!" and shares the Webcamp KL vision of having a strong tribe of highly engaged and satisfied members.

Following into our first talk was Michal Pietrusinski sharing a great introduction to white-hat SEO and why everyone could do it. According to Michal, there is one very critical strategy in getting ranked on the first page of Google, and with that, the tactics will easily follow and adapt. Find out what that secret sauce is!

The second talk was brought to you by yours truly (as the writer of the blog post :)) going through the steps of making a good podcast from a raw audio recording to a shiny entry in iTune's podcast page. In this talk, I shared all the workflow, tips and secrets in getting up to speed in making your own podcast and what pitfalls you should avoid. If you want to explore a new channel to spread your message to the masses, tune in!

We also had a special guest all the way from the UK this month: Kai Hendry, who have contributed to the HTML5 specification (WOW!). In this talk, Kai shared about a project called Ikiwiki, which sports some really great features that geeks would really appreciate: it stores pages in a revision control system and uses Markdown as the editing syntax. Not to mention that you can edit your wiki pages from the command line.

The audience were in a roll when Grey Ang took the stage and demoed two great tools that greatly speeds up your web development efforts: Jade and Stylus, mainly due to the fact that Grey played along with Harrinder's, umm, choice of word to be used in the demo. Get infected by the hilarious vibes from the Webcamp live audience :). Due to the fact that you can't see code through an audio session, you can grab the full source code from Grey's Github account.

Arzumy was playing soothsayer that night with the title "I, Paul the Octopus" – sharing his experiences in using the Google Prediction API. In his demo, he shows how you could hook up with the Predictions API, feed it with a list of titles used in landing pages and the traffic received and have it predict whether our titles for our new landing pages will prove to be a smash hit based on historical data. Neat!

To wrap it up, Brian Ritchie go on deep in the first of a two-part talk on Google Analytics. In this technical session, Brian teaches beyond the basic of the pretty dashboard on Google Analytics: he dives deep to show you how custom variables and multi-channel attribution open up to a wealth of data to help you understand your website visitors better and how well does your marketing campaign perform. As a business owner, you should check out this great overview to this power tool.
Help Wanted
It is raining jobs since the beginning the year and everyone is looking for talent: among them are Mindvalley (Brian Ritchie), Quantips (Talat), InstantTaxBack.com (Mila) and CellKast (Johnson). If you are a web developer/web designer, feel free to contact them!

The very thing that makes WebCamp KL awesome: rain or shine, WebCamp KL will go on – even on public holidays! Yes, while most Malaysians were celebrating our 54th Independence Day and Hari Raya, we're really pleased that there's a strong turnout and community bonding for this month's event. (and having pizza and beer helps, too!)

Despite being a shorter WebCamp than usual, we are glad to have a solid lineup of speakers:

Richerd Chan – How I went from being an iPhone developer to sleeping on the streets of Kuala Lumpur
Mats Engstrom – Electronics design: from idea to market

Summary
While we didn't intend to make it the theme, Richerd Chan kicked off with an eye-opening story of how does it feels like being homeless on the streets of Kuala Lumpur for several days: from being exposed to the elements (rain, in particular) to debunking the myth that Kuala Lumpur would be as quiet as a ghost town during the long holidays. And his story is bound to be really juicy when I had to bleep out certain words to spare unsuspecting listeners. Curious? Listen in! :D

Richerd previously lives as the principal developer for HootSuite's iOS application, adventurous at heart and working on a stealth startup that would transform your Gmail to a support helpdesk command centre.

And do you have a passion for electronics? And would you love to design an electronic kit to fellow hobbyist? And what if you could turn your passion into a side business? Joining us in our second talk is Mat Engstrom, who shares his experience and the process of starting your own electronics side business. There's some really solid nuggets you shouldn't miss out!
Q&A and Help Wanted Panel
Finally, we have 20 minutes of solid community townhouse session where members can ask for help from the community. Two Q&A questions were raised:

In a web application that has elements of HTML5, how do you maintain backwards compatibility with older versions of Internet Explorer? And is the effort of maintaining such support viable?
What a website that sells dresses can do to solve an Adwords campaign which has seen clickthroughs but zero conversion?

Some resources mentioned in this episode includes:


Modernizr
Google Chrome Frame
Twitter's Bootstrap framework

Highlights of the help wanted session:


Christina wanted to know a cost estimate of developing and maintaining a social media site for a niche market, as well as seeking for investment for her new startup
Khalid from StyleKandi is looking for a frontend developer for their startup, contact AnticsMedia for details
Nicholas Yip from Innity is looking for 13 experienced, hardcore web developers who is confident is handle large loads of data
Joshua is looking for a technical co-founder for a mobile social media site for a niche market
Daniel from Experian is looking for Javascript specialists
A hackerspace in Multimedia Universiti, Cyberjaya is looking for volunteers to mentor the younger generation
An experienced product developer is offering consultation services to accelerate your startup
The same web developer who asked for help in the Q&A for his online store to sell dresses is looking for side hustles and offers his experience in PostgreSQL, accounting and ERP systems

In the spirit of WebCamp, we are always eager to try new things to spice things up. In this meetup, we are trying out two new formats: Pecha Kucha (20 slides, 20 seconds each) and Powerpoint-Karaoke (impromptu presentations on random slides).

We are...