12 September 2004

In Munich airport, en route to Barcelona.

Foo Camp this year was, hard to believe, even better than last year. A quick recap of the last two days…

Thursday night I landed in San Francisco, and spent the night on the floor of my sister Peach’s living room in the Castro. Watson, a friend from MIT and another recent East Coast transplant, came out with us for pizza and a beer at a place called The Flying Elephant in Potrero.

Me and Peach at the pizza place.

The next morning, I went down to Menlo Park to chat with the guys at Sun about Evolution, OpenOffice, and the suchlike. Hans Muller and I ended up talking about robots for a while (it turns out his former life was in robotics). He sent me this oddity.

Then I picked Robert Love up at the airport. We went to REI to get Robert a tent, and that’s when Jon Trowbridge called with important news about Beagle: open queries now update automatically when files change on your filesystem. Take that, Spotlight!

Robert receives the news with enthusiasm.

Our long drive to Sebastapol, though fraught with heavy traffic, was punctuated by a bizarre incident involving three middle-aged women in strange disguises.

After xeroxing my face at a Kinko’s, we arrived just in time for dinner.

Robert tries to set up his tent.

Tim O’Reilly led an intro session where everyone had to summarize their interests in a maximum of three words. Larry Wall brought down the house when he stood up and said “Larry Wall, cult leader.”

Scoble videotaped everything.

Not to wax too self-indulgent, but what’s rich about Foo Camp is when you’re sitting in the hacking room in a discussion about how people don’t trust PayPal, and then the head of the PayPal developer network comes over and everyone works out that PayPal could require email confirmation for charges above a user-configurable ceiling, and then the Google guys are running around upping people’s daily limits on their API keys so they can do more interesting search experiments, and someone in the corner is swiping everyone’s mag stripes and augmenting his card identification database, and then you wander outside just as a cardboard rocket shoots up 100 feet over the camp site … and so on.

Tim Anderson explaining 3d printing.

The point is, I just felt really lucky to be there, among such creative and smart people. O’Reilly is at the center of an incredible universe of individuals, and Foo Camp manages to get bright people from all over the map, employed by companies in cut-throat competition with one another, to come together and actually share ideas. Two years in a row, Foo Camp really raises my spirits.

My dear friend Rhett Creighton.

But of course, sooner than I wanted to leave, it was back to the airport and onwards to Barcelona.