Last weekend most of the FourStarters went to BarcampBrighton. Not only was it weird to see so many Dutch people there (at least 7 on 100 campers, including Reinier, Alper, Melinda, Sjors and me) but it was also amazing how smooth the open Wi-Fi was during the weekend. The last few conferences/camps I went to were a disaster when it came to Wi-Fi. Either it was tedious to get into with day passes that expired during the night, or it broke down within minutes due to overloading. The strange thing about the perfect Wi-Fi at BarcampBrighton was that there was actually no Wi-Fi planned!

The organizers of BarcampBrighton had decided attempting to set up some form of Wi-Fi would probably be futile due to their experiences at other conferences. As the decision was announced at forehand, everyone had decided to bring patch cables (except for me and Melinda, oops) so that they could hook up to the switches. It wasn’t before long though that people like Reinier had set up there own laptops to share Wi-Fi to others. This went pretty fine as there was an instant Wi-Fi reception on more than one access point, that way spreading the load.

Obviously some people had thought a bit further ahead, bringing their own Linksys/Apple routers along to make sure that there would be some kind of permanent solution before the night. This took some more time to set up but proved to be very resilient. Apparently the guys that provide the Wi-Fi at the beach in Brighton (PierToPier) had set up a very good Wi-Fi network indoor that I actually didn’t have to use all day.

In the end we were just all amazed at how we, with some landlines, could provide to a hundred people a more resilient Wi-Fi connection than most of us had ever experienced at any conference. A lesson can be learned here about geeks and their power to do things on their own, and I think we should be proud of that. Geeks in the world, unite (wireless-ly)!

It has been a while since we had some regular posts here on FourStarters. The main reasons being the holiday season, which obviously also affects us. Starting today I am planning to bring FourStarters back to speed with some interesting posts about startups, webapps, and any other software.

Next up we also plan to attend a few conferences in the next few weeks, starting with dConstruct and BarCampBrighton this week. Alper and Sjors start of by going to the dConstruct conference this week in Brighton (UK) after which they will join Melinda, Reinier and me at BarCampBrighton during the weekend.

We are hoping that Alper and Sjors are able to give us some live feedback from the dConstruct conference, including some nice photos. Highlights of the conference will be the workshops on Microformats, Experience Design, and more. I haven’t got word from Alper or Sjors yet on what workshops they were going to attend, but I guess it must be something interesting.

Although BarCampBrighton will be the first BarCamp in Brighton ever, it will definitely be a strange one with 5% of the attendees being Dutch. There were only 100 tickets available for this small and local BarCamp, so this way it is going to be an interesting experience for both us and the other people at the conference. At least with this amount of people it can’t be hard to have some live reports from the conferences.

We are hoping to see you all soon at any of the conferences.