On Saturday the much anticipated BarCamp Manchester happened at CityLabs after a 2 year hiatus and this year I had the pleasure of arranging for Avanade to be the Gold sponsor.

BarCamp Manchester is an unconference, where anyone can arrive and choose any topic they like, add it to the days speaking "grid" and speak on in it 25 minutes. There is generally a tech theme running through it but many of the talks are of a non-tech nature.

This event is particularly important to me, as it was perhaps one of my first forays into public speaking a few years ago as it gives new speakers an opportunity to speak to a small, welcoming audience on a topic of their choice. I can potentially thank BarCamp Manchester for encouraging me to do further public speaking engagements and eventually receive Microsoft MVP award for community contributions.

You can read more about the event on the BarCamp Twitter feed.

The "grid" for the morning looked like before it started filling up..

After I gave a talk on Machine Learning in the morning, I attended a talks on UX design, tech meetups, Web Monetization API (W3C standard candidate), self advocation and what it is like being a twin - so a wide range of topics.

I met some great people, including colleagues, students studying AI and someone looking to partner with innovative tech companies, so lots of interesting conversations had.

I'm #AvanadeProud that Avanade could help make this event happen. If any of the attendees are thinking about the next step in their career, they can check out careers.avanade.com or get in touch with me.

Many thanks to Claire McDonald, Luce Carter and Chris Northwood for organising and I hope to see them again next year!

-- Lee