San Francisco
FooCamp
Last week was crazy. Six airplanes, three time zones, four different hotels, two rental cars, an Acquia Board meeting, two nights in a tent and ultimately, my mind blown at FooCamp.
Off to a meeting in a tiny little airplane. In line behind the big guys. Taken with my iPhone.
FooCamp is the annual invitation-only conference organized by Tim O'Reilly. It is the mother of BarCamp, if you will. The people you get to meet at FooCamp are impressive, and the format (including the nightly campfires) really sets people up to talk, brainstorm and geek out. The result? A fire hose of new ideas and a lot of new friends. Thanks Tim!
Joi Ito took this picture of me so I had to take one of him. Joi is CEO of Creative Commons, and is (or was) on the board of Technorati, ICANN, Mozilla Foundation, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and much more. He is also an early stage investor in Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, and other internet companies.
Just like last year, I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the Foos are using Drupal, planning to use Drupal, or even evangelizing Drupal. More good stuff comin'!
More photos in my FooCamp gallery.
Gilbane
I'm in San Francisco this week to sing the Drupal gospel at the Gilbane conference. I take part in a panel discussion called Social Technologies for Ad Hoc Information Sharing. Also on the panel will be John Newton, co-founder and CTO of Alfresco, and Michael Wechner, president of Wyona.
Tomorrow evening, Chris Messina is organizing a Drupal and DiSo dinner to talk more about DiSo, a collection of tools to enable distributed social networking applications. Feel free to join us!
More details in the video blog below:
FooCamp was mindblowing
It's not every day that you get to meet so many great people, or that you get to talk to Larry Page (co-founder Google). I feel overwhelmed, yet inspired, and I'm pleasantly surprised by how many people are using Drupal on this side of the planet. Thanks O'Reilly!
From left to right: Jeff Robbins (co-founder Lullabot + Drupal contributor + former rockstar), Larry Page (co-founder Google) and Evan Williams (co-founder Blogger.com, co-founder Odeo, co-founder Twitter).
Drupal and The Onion
For more than a year, The Onion, a fake news site, has been using Drupal. They have millions of visitors a day, and probably have one of the most popular Drupal sites in the world (not to mention one of the funniest Drupal sites in the world).
While that is a great testament for Drupal, no one really knew who built The Onion, and every once in a while that topic came up amongst us Drupal developers.
Well, not anymore! Yesterday, we gave them a surprise visit and stopped by their office in San Francisco. We met with Michael Greer, Director of Web Development, who promptly took us out for lunch. We ended up talking about performance and scalability over Greek food in the park.
So without further ado, one of the Drupal faces behind The Onion:
Michael Greer, Director of Web Technology at The Onion.
FooCamp
Tomorrow, I'm off to San Francisco to attend FooCamp, the annual invitation-only conference organized by Tim O'Reilly.
Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised when Tim O'Reilly invited me to FooCamp a couple months ago. I first met Tim little more than a year ago when we had a breakfast meeting in Sebastopol. We talked about Drupal and Open Source software, Tim connected me with various other people in the Open Source community, and after breakfast, we were invited to spend some time at the O'Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol.
And now FooCamp. I've never seen a line-up of people this impressive. Some of them include Larry Page (co-founder Google), Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect at Microsoft), Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus and of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Mitchel Baker (President of the Mozilla Corporation), Allison Randal (Perl Foundation), Guido van Rossum (founder of Python), Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger.com, co-founder Twitter), Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent), Kevin Rose (creator of Digg), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr), Chris Dibona (Open Source Manager at Google and one of my favorite geek-heroes), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google) ... the list goes on and on.
Despite the incredibly interesting audience at FooCamp, the opportunities, the desire to evangelize Drupal, the quest for what to do after my PhD, and the many friends I have in San Francisco, I can't help but feel out of place already. Maybe this feeling stems from the fact that I have to leave my pregnant wife behind for a couple days, I don't know. One thing is for sure: life has been a chain of unexpected and often incredible events that keep taking me by surprise. I'm grateful for that. :)
