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I flew into SFO around 3:00pm. After grabbing a quick bite to eat and checking email, I picked up my rental car. 2.5 hours later, I arrived in Sebastopol. It was bumper to bumper traffic 90% of the way which made for some grueling driving. Expecting this, I burned a couple of audio book CDs before I left and listened to them which made the drive more bearable.

First thing I noticed when I arrived at O’Reilly was that it was COLD! I don’t remember it being this cold last year. When I got there everyone was finishing up dinner. Oddly enough, the first conversation I found myself in was with Michael Lynn (yes, that Michael Lynn) and Michael Loukides (O’Reilly editor friend of mine). Since I work at Cisco, Lynn and I obviously had a lot to talk about. Lynn is a bright, energetic guy that has been through a real whirlwind lately with all the media attention he’s received over his Blackhat presentation. Even though he no longer works at ISS (he gave me the gory details of his departure), I’m sure he’ll do fine.

We were then called up to the third floor of the O’Reilly building for the camp introduction. One thing that was apparent is that there are considerably more people at Foo Camp this year than last. I know some people are upset about not being invited, but the fact is the O’Reilly facilities can only handle about 200 people — there has to be a limit on the invitations. If they opened it up, the event would turn into a big convention of open source hackers — oh yeah that already exists, it is called OSCON. People were spilling out of the undersized conference room and I was stuck in one of the halls just barely in eye shot of Tim. He explained the history of Foo Camp and how it is a self-organizing conference. In a few minutes everyone was to write up on big boards what they wanted to present and when.

Next came the introductions. Because there are so many people, everyone was limited to saying 1) their name, 2) company, and 3) three words. If you say more than three words, Tim was ready with a Gong to shut you down. A change from last year: if there is someone that you wanted to give a talk or someone said something that interested you, you were to shout out “talk”. The introductions proceeded. Of course the interesting part was the three words the campers said. People tried to be serious, intriguing, or funny (and sometimes all three). The introduction that got the most laughs and made me roll on the floor came from Brian Ingerson. Dick Hardt (of ActiveState fame) gave his introduction. Brian sat beside him. Brian got up and after saying his name and company, said: “beer in one hand, dick in the other”. It was the funniest thing I’ve heard in a while. Maybe you had to be there, but that sent the crowd into an uproar.

I decided to go the funny route with my three words, but given their controversial nature, I won’t include them here (ask me directly if you are interested). I got a round of laughter followed by a chorus of “talk”, “talk”. It was funny.

A few other people of note I spotted in the crowd include: Martin Fowler (Agile), Blake Ross (Firefox), Larry Wall (Perl), Ray Ozzie (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Chris DiBona (Google), Bram Cohen (BitTorrent).

After we finished up the intros, the schedule boards were mobbed by people writing in their talks and others trying to figure out what they wanted to attend. I decided to head outside to escape the mob. I saw a small fire and some people standing around it. Turns out they were roasting marshmallows and making smores. It had been years since I’d done anything like that (I don’t do much camping). The marshmallows and smores were quite good. Then I saw Scott Berkun (of The Art of PM fame) approaching. I introduced myself and complimented him on a book well done. We chatted for a while about writing and I told him a bit about my next writing project based on my MIT thesis. Scott is working on a fiction book that he plans to finish up soon. Best of luck Scott! Robert Lefkowitz (R0ml) also joined the conversation and the three of us chatted about working at big companies (Scott worked at Microsoft for 10 years and Robert worked at Fidelity and AT&T Wireless to name a couple).

I proceeded back in the building because I heard Tim O’Reilly was giving his data visualization and tech trends talk. O’Reilly Research is doing a bunch of interesting work analyzing book and job data among other things (like the effects of Slashdot). They’ve created a big data warehouse and a set of graphical tools to visualize the data. It is quite impressive. O’Reilly is way ahead of the curve in terms technology analysis compared to other media companies. You can download a copy of a similar presentation Tim gave at OSCON here.

After Tim’s talk it was about 11:45pm (2:45am eastern!) so I decided to call it a night.

All in all, the first evening was worth the trip alone.