Episode: 2151
Title: HPR2151: BarCamp Manchester part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2151/hpr2151.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:56:43

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This is HPR episode 2,151 entitled Bar Camp Manchester Part 2 and is part of the series
Interview.
It is hosted by Tony H.1,212 and is about 9 minutes long.
The summary is an interview with the organizer and one of the sponsors of the event.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
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Okay, this is Tony Hughes for Hacker Public Radio and I'm at Bar Camp Manchester.
Okay, this is Tony Hughes for Hacker Public Radio and I'm at Bar Camp Manchester.
Number 7 and with me I've got the organizer Claire Dodd or Girl Geek Up North as she's known on Twitter.
Claire, could you tell us a little bit about what Bar Camp Manchester is about?
Sure, so Bar Camp is an unconference where it's different from traditional conferences.
We have no scheduled speakers at all.
Everyone rocks up on the first day and the only scheduled item is the opening talk from me.
And after that anyone who attends is welcome to talk about anything they feel passionate about.
The talk slots are 30 minutes and they're not decided until the morning of the first day
and people just turn up, write their name and the name of the talk on a piece of card
and pop it up in the grade on an available slot.
We have six tracks running simultaneously and I think we have about 14 sessions for the first day
because this year we're doing an overnight conference so we're going all the way up to 10 o'clock tonight with our talks
and then we start again.
It's morning and it's all the same up until 6 o'clock.
I believe even after 10 o'clock there's going to be certain activities going on during the evening
or later into the night.
Yes, we always have some evening entertainment.
We have a game called Werewolf that's traditionally played at Bar Camps
which will no doubt be being played.
I reckon probably pushing for maybe three far in the morning.
Sounds very interesting.
Actually we talked away in bed by then I'm afraid.
Could you just tell us how you got involved in actually organising Manchester Bar Camp?
Yes, so I first attended Bar Camp.
I think it was about five or six years ago.
I went to Bar Camp Blackpool organised by Liz Pound and Gemma Cameron
and it was my first experience of anything like that whatsoever.
I didn't know what to expect and I turned up and it was absolutely amazing.
It was the best thing I've ever been to and I was completely hooked from there.
So I attended Bar Camp Blackpool for three years running
and then the year after that even Forrest put a call out saying he wanted to resurrect Bar Camp Manchester
which had been on the haters for a few years.
And would anyone like to help?
So being a complete lover of Bar Camps
and totally wanting to help that happen in Manchester, I volunteered
and did quite a lot of the work in the first year where we held it at Space Park X.
And after that I kind of ran with it so this is now my third year
and it takes over my life but in a really good way.
Yeah, having been a friend of Liz Pounder who, like you say, was one of the founders of Bar Camp Blackpool.
I know how much work goes into organising these events.
You've obviously got quite a team.
Is there anyone you'd like to thank in particular?
Oh gosh.
Yeah, so on the day we just, it can't happen on your own.
You've got to have some part.
I mean, my other half, Aaron, is absolutely phenomenal.
He never really officially volunteers every year.
He's just a person standing next to me that's like, please let me go do this.
Please let me go do this.
And he's like the silent helper that really is kind of, he's the one that takes over the Bar Camp on the day
because I'm the one that's running around doing all the face to face stuff.
He's the one running around making sure the urns are topped up, making sure he's gone.
And then we've got an amazing car team of volunteers this year.
So we've got Rick Threlfall who's doing our t-shirts.
So we have an amazing team of our t-shirts.
Very epoxy hour as well.
Fantastic t-shirts this year.
And he's helping out on the day.
We've got some of the volunteers.
We've got Anna and Angela, Simon and Laura and Jane.
They're all helping out during the day.
So you'll see them running around with plates of food.
And the effort has to go our volunteers because the only, the rest of the perks have been a volunteer.
You get your pick of the swag.
You need the first to get fed.
But other than that, other than that.
It's all about just helping out and wanting to get involved in the community.
And then obviously tomorrow we've got a national coding week workshops as well.
So we've got a ton of devs who have volunteered to help out mentoring and coaching.
And on those workshops, we really can't do it without people like that.
Brilliant.
We hear it just about 10 to 12 coming up to lunch.
But we've already had a couple of talks.
Is there anything that struck you as particularly enjoyable this morning so far?
Oh my gosh, yes.
I've just been to a talk by a young chap called Joshua who's 12 years old working on edge of pace then.
Absolutely phenomenal.
I can't believe he's only been coding since February this year.
And he's already designing his own libraries and really getting some amazing stuff out there
that are going to help young people learn how to code.
It's absolutely phenomenal what the young generation are capable of now.
And I think he's an absolute stand out for what he's achieved so far.
Yes.
I've interviewed Josh for the HDR in the past.
And I've just videoed his talk.
So that will be available via his website at some time in the future.
But yeah, he's fantastic.
I also went to a talk on women in tech run by Alan.
Did you get a chance to see that?
I didn't know, but I've worked a lot with Alan.
I know he's quite passionate about that subject as I'm sure many people are.
He's always a recurring theme at back.
And we do tend to have quite a lot of talks along that line.
Okay, well, thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed.
And hopefully we'll see you at my bar camp next year.
Hopefully, yes.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Hello.
This is Tony Hughes again for Michael Public Radio.
I'm still at bar camp Manchester.
And I've got Damien from Layershift, who's one of the bar camp Manchester sponsors this year.
And he's going to explain a little bit about what they are.
Okay.
So we are a managed hosting company with best hearing Manchester.
We've been going since about 2006.
We're here this year to publicise our new hosting platform called EndScale.
So it's a platform service for Java, PHP, Ruby and Python-based web applications.
And we have a scaling challenge.
So we're challenging the attendees here to build the highest hour of wooden blocks, a dangle style game.
So we're going to see who can get the most moves within five minutes.
Okay.
Well, that's interesting.
When you say you're a hosting company, what kind of hosting did you do in the sense of that the community might be interested?
For the interesting question.
So most of our hosting is for smaller medium sized businesses.
So we host anything from like blogs or e-commerce sites.
Our typical customer maybe has 20 or 13 employees.
There's certainly lots of our customers are based either here in Manchester or around the northwest.
And yeah, they are hosting on things like, for example, Magento or PrestaShop.
And you know, different mostly PHP based applications is our sort of core market, let's say.
But we have some much bigger customers as well.
People like Laura Ashley and the transport marketplace called Shiply.
We have like a very broad spectrum of customers.
Okay.
So what kind of costs would a typical hosting site that you provide cost?
Okay.
So our kind of starting price is around around about 35 pounds per month.
Because we are targeting mainly sort of business customers, then it's not like how cheap can we provide it, but it's about the values.
So for example, with our hosting service, we will manage the sort of security aspects of the server itself.
So we are effectively providing, let's say we are saving you from having to hire, you know, assist admin in your company.
So we're saving you maybe, you know, that 30 or how many thousand pounds per year for that member of staff, you know, by paying like a few hundred pounds a year to us.
So do you provide web design services as well?
No, we actually work with many web design companies in the area, so lots of freelancers or web design studios.
And because of that, we don't sort of enter that market, we're not, you know, basically eating our own customers business.
Okay.
Would you like to tell the listeners who may be interested, may have a small business out there, how they can contact you?
Yes, so the best way to find out more about our services is surprisingly on our website.
So at lershift.com, yeah, we have all the information there about our managed VPSs and also our platform service.
Okay, thank you very much.
This is Tony Hughes from H like a public radio signing off.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
