Foo Camp 2011

This year I was lucky to have been invited to Foo Camp in Sebastopol, CA. I had some idea of what to expect because I have gone to Kiwi Foo a few times.

All in all, Foo is a very inspiring and humbling experience. There are some seriously accomplished and smart people all around. I was very lucky to have been invited, and felt really happy the whole time.

Fitness Wackos

I helped lead a session with Brady Forrest and Matt Cutts on Fitness, entitled, "Fitness Wackos". We came up with some ideas we jotted down here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rocketqueen/5826827606/in/set-72157626954123184

It is possible a book may come out of this session. It depends on my plans for the summer, but essentially, there are some things that appear to be common for Geeks who are fit, like me. One of the more common traits is ritualization. Setting up some form of structure that forces a 7 days a week activity schedule. It could be a carpool, a marathon you told people you would run, a fitness group you signed up for, or something else.

Another interesting idea is to transcend short term goals that people usually fail to meet: lose 10 pounds, go to the gym, etc, and move into data driven analysis. There are many devices now that will give you a "quantified self" view. From a scale that records your moving weight and body fat percentage to an iphone, to apps that keep track of your fitness. This may represent a new analytic frontier for health and fitness.

Distributed Algorithms

I also led a session on Distributed Algorithms, and one of the open questions I had was, "Does language matter?". I am not sure there was an answer, but I still hope for the idea of functional programming as a cure for our concurrency problems.

Conclusion

I had a great time and was very grateful for the opportunity to attend Foo. Thanks O'Reilly team!

A whole set of photos from Foo Camp can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com//photos/rocketqueen/sets/72157626954123184/show/