Friday and Saturday Foo Camp Roundup

Tonight ends an event­ful day and a half here in the rolling pas­tures of Sebastopol, California—home of O’Reilly Media and 350 of its clos­est friends. For those that don’t know, Foo Camp is a yearly event held at the O’Reilly campus in which friends of O’Reilly (hence, foo) gather to dis­cuss all things tech­nol­ogy, pub­lish­ing, sci­ence and pro­gram­ming. It’s slated as an uncon­fer­ence, and has no set sched­ule until every­one arrives the day of the event. After the open­ing talk, atten­dees fill in the three giant white boards with ses­sions about their work and their inter­ests. It’s a great oppor­tu­nity to meet other colleagues that share similar interests and see what work is being done at some of the top tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies in the world.

Friday night started out with a demo by Chris Hecker of the Spore Crea­ture Cre­ator and an inside look at the devel­op­ment and animation environments that were used to build the game. Fol­low­ing that was a Cello per­for­mance by Zoe Keat­ing, who uses MIDI and hard disk record­ing to achieve sur­real single-instrument orchestration. Sat­ur­day was a marathon of ses­sions, most of which were a bit over my head, but interesting and eye-​opening none the less. High­lights of the day were lis­ten­ing to Ed Lu talk about his space adven­tures in a ses­sion enti­tled “Learn how to Fly the Space Shuttle” and meet­ing Chris DiBona, the open source project man­ager at Google and former host of TWIT’s FLOSS Weekly. Sunday looks to be more of the same and I can’t wait to see how the final day’s ses­sions unfold.

tagged: foo camp, sebastopol