kiwi foo camp / baacamp07

On the registration form where it asked, "describe yourself in three words/phrases", I was "Lost for words". The other questions were, "name three people that you think should have been here, and their e-mail addresses" and "what would you bring back from the future?" For a technical conference, that the sample (of about 2) forms I looked at both said "World Peace" was a cool little sample of the vibe.

The camp was simply amazing, maximum kudos to Russell and Nat for organising it, and the school that hosted it. It wasn't the technically focused camp I was expecting - I was pleasantly surprised to see a marvellous cross-section of people from all walks of society. I ended up only giving a single talk out of the ones I prepared, but certainly talked to interested people over the weekend about the topics I didn't make a formal session of.

Apparently due to Nat's connection with Perl, the barrier of entry for people in the Perl community was substantially lower than would have otherwise been the case - I think I can count myself lucky :-). It certainly wasn't "elitist", people were extremely approachable in general and lots of new connections were made.

Instead of doing a round-up of who I saw etc, I thought I'd make a separate post on each of some of the "hot topics" that people were talking about.