The People: There are quite a few people I know here, which is surprising considering I've only been in the area for 3 weeks. Some BarCamp NYC attendees, coworkers, and a friend from Yahoo, so far. I initially started helping with sign-in so I met lots of folks at the door. Later time was spent wandering around and chatting about various interests. Meeting new folks is definitely still not my forte, but I seem to be doing decently. The two folks I know from BarCamp NYC recognized me by my pajamas. I tried to find a photo of said event with my pajamas featured but Flickr doesn't seem to let you search by comments. At any rate, there's a lot of people in attendance so the next two days should be quite fun. There's a few VCs here, marketing and other types. On the whole, there's mostly geeks. The type of geek ranges from high-up engineers to self-employed consultants to I-just-do-this-in-my-free-time hackers.
The Venue: Microsoft is this camp's host. The office is very large and has a number of conference rooms. There are 8 presentation areas setup for this camp. That's probably more than is necessary, but more is always better than less. It's ironic considering the location and the openness of the event. That is, how the common view of Microsoft is of an evil megacorp, while it is the host to an incredibly successful open-style conference. Thanks for the venue, Microsoft!
Between final exams, moving, situating with a new job at Google, etc, I haven't had any time to work on new projects. Therefore, I don't really have anything to present on. However, I'm considering having a BoF-type session where we share ideas on computing productivity. I'm always finding irritating barriers in software that have solutions available but I don't know about them and don't seem to find them while searching. We'll see.
Common interests seem to be Flock, Drupal, social networking, etc. Seems like a similar set of interests and people as at BarCamp NYC. Have the last 5 months sat idle amongst the "new software technology" community? I can't tell, but I'm sure I'll find out tomorrow. Either way, I'm looking forward to the presentations.
I'll poll tomorrow for feedback on what I probably should present on, but current ideas are: anti-hype presentation discussing AJAX (what it is, what it's not? where it may be going) or general productivity to find/share what people use to make computing use easier.