First day at EMFcamp

So, this is it. The first day of EMFcamp is over and I came back to a warm, dry bed instead of freezing to death in a tent between a lake, a helipad and a motorway. That’s the advantage of living a mere 20 minutes cycle away from the event site. This doesn’t happen often though, as Milton Keynes isn’t exactly the most lively place in the UK.

The site looks great – as long as it doesn’t rain -, and the talks so far have been very interesting. My only regret is that the badges are not ready yet, but they will soon be available. Hopefully.

After locking my bike, I had a quick tour around the site to find out where the talks and workshop tents are, where the food is available, and, most importantly, went to the bar. They serve a nice local beer for a good price. They also serve Beck, which they mistakenly refer to as ‘beer’, and Club Mate. I’ve heard of Club Mate a lot as a hacker drink, but never actually tried it. That issue has now been resolved. It’s good. I like it. It’s full of caffeine (48gr/bottle according to the label). I like it even more. I have a vague feeling that I shouldn’t drink too much of it though. One more reason to stick to beer .

As with the talks, I happened to have mostly stayed in tent Beta (when not in the bar, that is). The talks were interesting and varied.

• The Future is Right Here, by Jez. Although I didn’t understand everything, the main idea is interesting. It seems to boil down to creating trees (sort of mindmap-like things) and sharing branches with different people. I’m not sure how this would work in practice and how in would scale up, both in terms of the number of users and the size of each tree, but an interesting project anyway. Also, I don’t understand why it has to use trees. Surely, graphs are better. I would want my cycles!
• Two-fisted tales of DevOps – beards vs. process by John Hawkes-Reed. That was an interesting one too. John is a unix sys admin, and talked about the solution his company has been working on to deploy applications on lots and lots of servers. Includes git, java, message queues, puppet, and lots of great things that make people’s lives easier. John is also a great public speaker, and his talk was funny on top of being interesting.
• DNSSEC, What it is and why you need it by Jasper Wallace. A quick but very interesting talk about DNSSEC, which problems it can solve, and how. Also featured horror stories of DNS poisoning and various attacks that could be easily avoided. There’s a follow-up talk (or is it a workshop?) later in the weekend, apparently.
• Lightning talks. We had a few improvised lightning talks of great quality, covering subjects such as food distribution algorithms in a pub, a hilarious rant against date formats in log files (I completely agree with the speaker on that one), lightning, datacentres, why sys admins hate developers, someone who hates web applications, etc. Lots of fun.

After the lightning talks, the discussion carried on with a few of the attendees. We mentioned, in no particular order, the Mars rover, developers, operating systems, web applications, things going horribly wrong with servers and workstations, amusing ‘games’ that are probably only funny to computer people (well at least we all found them funny), jokes, etc.

Then I came home. It’s COLD, but at least I’m not sleeping in a tent. This was a great first day, and I hope tomorrow will be just as good. Hopefully the badges will be ready by then .