An engineer, a marketer, and a VC walk into a bar... well not really a bar, but rather Microsoft's cavernous offices in SF. Welcome to CloudCamp, a Sun sponsored unconference that took place last night. Since it was organized by the Community team in the same org that I'm in, I felt a certain sense of team loyalty to attend, mingle, and learn- ok that and I happen to live within walking distance and there was free food and alcohol- wheeee!
I won't bore you with details about the event happenings- if you're really curious, you can read here, here, or just google "cloudcamp".
Here were some of my key takeaways from the event:
- Unconferences rock. Mostly. The first two hours were crammed full of good topics and great speakers/moderators. It was nice to feel involved in sessions, talking with rather than being talked at. Then it all came crashing down in the last hour. The free-for-all format can be good or bad depending on how topics are placed. In this case, last was not necessarily best.
- Clouds are fluffy- much like the real thing, people's definition of the "cloud" tended to be soft, ambiguous, and not really sure what's inside... basically full of fluff. One of the most attended sessions happened to be "What is Cloud Computing?". One hour and 50+ people later, there still wasn't a concensus. Funny enough, that session did happen to be filled with developers, ops, business folks, and VCs, each with their own professional take on the cloud, like a technical rashomon.
- Kudos to Sara and Jesse for helping to shape this event. 3.5 weeks to pull this event off is definitely impressive!
