Excellent scene. The paper aeroplane contest was fiendishly difficult… More anon.
[Later, back home.]
The format was excellent – two series of “Ask Later” talks, each 5 minutes long with the slides set to auto-advance whether or not the speaker was ready! The topics ranged from teaching CS in prisons to IT ops with the US Marines in Al-Anbar Province, by way of such things as running your life on Outlook(!), social network tagging, bee-keeping, choosing business names, naturopathic “health hacks”, surviving Lyme disease, getting skeptical about security, hanging with the Touareg, and optimising the fuel efficiency of aero engines! The full list is here. I guess that there were about 200-250 people there: a nice crowd, all ages and quite heterogeneous.
Two things struck me. First, a lot of my friends at Amazon would enjoy this. Next time, let’s mob it. And second, if I were told that I had to do one of these talks, what subject would I choose? That’s an intriguing question….
Here’s a phone-cam picture of the paper airplane contest in full swing. The woman holding the target got hit quite a few times….
UPDATE: The crowd was larger than I thought: 351, according to the Ignite blog.. Excellent!