Terry Jones

I spent last weekend at the Open Social Foo camp held on the O’Reilly campus in Sebastopol, CA. The camp was organized by David Recordon and Scott Kveton, with sponsorship from various companies, especially including O’Reilly. I was lucky enough to have my airfare paid for, so lots of thanks to all concerned for that.

The camp was great. Very few people actually camped, almost everyone just found somewhere to sleep in the O’Reilly offices. Many of us didn’t sleep that much anyway.

There’s something about the modern virtual lifestyle that so many of us lead that leaves a real social hole. It’s been about 20 years since I really hung out at all hours with other coders. It’s something I associate most strongly with being an undergrad, with working at Micro Forté, and then in doing a lot of hacking as a grad student at The University of Waterloo in Canada.

So even though it was just 48 hours at the foo camp, it was really great. It’s not often I have the pleasurable feeling of being surrounded by tons of people who know way way more than I do about almost everything under discussion. That’s not meant to sound arrogant – I mean that I don’t get out enough, and I don’t live in SF, etc. It’s nice to have spent many years hanging around universities studying all sorts of relatively obscure and academic topics, and sometimes you wonder what everyone else was doing. Some of those people spent the years hacking really deeply on systems, and their knowledge appears encyclopedic next to the smattering of stuff I picked up along the way. It’s nice to bump into a whole bunch of them at once. It was extremely hard to get a word in in many of the animated conversations, which reminded me at times of discussions at the Santa Fe Institute. That’s a bit of a pain, but it’s still far better than some alternatives – e.g., not having a room full of super confident deeply knowledgeable people who all want to have their say, even if that means trampling all over others, ignoring what the previous speaker said, not leaving even 1/10th of a second conversational gap, and just plain old bull-dozering on while others try to jump in and wrest away control of the conversation.

I could write much more about all this.

I also played werewolf with up to 20 others on the Saturday night. In some ways I don’t really like the game, but it’s fun to sit around with a bunch of smart people of all ages who are all trying to convince each other they’re telling the truth when you know for sure some are lying. I was up until 4:30am that night. I went to the office I slept in on the Friday night, but found it had about 10 people still up, all talking about code. When I got up at 8am the next morning, they were all still there, still talking about code. I felt a bit guilty, like a glutton, for allowing myself three and a half hours sleep. Nice.

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