Foo too
This past weekend a small contingent of Xeroes headed up to Warkworth for the annual geek pilgrimage that is Kiwi Foo Camp.
When you roll with Rod anything can happen. This time, on the drive up from the airport to Warkworth we took a quick little detour to do some skiing at Snowplanet. For those of you up north (northern hemisphere), February is a great time of year to go skiing. Down south, it’s the height of summer. Snowplanet is an indoor ski field.
It was absolutely awesome. I didn’t want to leave. When we came out into the hot, humid baking sunny day the utter surreal-ness was intense. Admittedly, the whole time I had a dirty nagging feeling that my carbon footprint was off the charts.
Which made it especially interesting to meet Ian Wright and see his presentation on saving the planet (while going obscenely fast) in his electric car, the Wrightspeed X1.
My takeaways: If you have a late model car that gets 35mpg then you really aren’t a significant part of the problem. In LA, those cars output cleaner air than they take in. It’s the gas guzzling SUV’s and light trucks that are the real killers. Turning those into hybrids can make a very significant difference. That’s Ian’s ultimate plan.
I always really enjoy when Tim Norton of PlanHQ gets talking. He and Dave ten Have from Ponoko ran a really good session on taking your kiwi company and product to the world. Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian also chimed in with some good insights.
My takeaways: Get your ass on a plane and spend time in your target market. Get in front of the key players and stay in front of them. Just remember that hype does not equal money in the bank.
Nat, the organiser of Kiwi Foo, ran a session on teaching kids to program. He shared his experiences with Scratch, I shared some of my experiences working with kids using Flash and various other people piped up with their experiences using other tools and methods. I came away glad that I’m not the only one who’s underwhelmed by Mindstorms.
My takeaways: Tech ed is wide open and yet to be cracked. I’m very interested in being one of the people to crack it.
There were a whole lot of sessions that I really regret missing, especially one on Meraki. It looks like people are starting to bring Meraki here to NZ. Wellington is ideally suited for it. That would certainly help fulfill my prediction that mesh networks catch on in 2008.
The place was crawling with iPhones, so thankfully John Ballinger whipped together this fantastically useful iPhone directory of all the Foo sessions.
As always, it was great fun with great people. Next year, I would prefer to see some upfront planning for the sessions, kinda like the way barcamp do or even better, like the SXSW panel picker.
