Dries Buytaert

Tomorrow, I'm off to San Francisco to attend FooCamp, the annual invitation-only conference organized by Tim O'Reilly.

Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised when Tim O'Reilly invited me to FooCamp a couple months ago. I first met Tim little more than a year ago when we had a breakfast meeting in Sebastopol. We talked about Drupal and Open Source software, Tim connected me with various other people in the Open Source community, and after breakfast, we were invited to spend some time at the O'Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol.

And now FooCamp. I've never seen a line-up of people this impressive. Some of them include Larry Page (co-founder Google), Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect at Microsoft), Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus and of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Mitchel Baker (President of the Mozilla Corporation), Allison Randal (Perl Foundation), Guido van Rossum (founder of Python), Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger.com, co-founder Twitter), Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent), Kevin Rose (creator of Digg), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr), Chris Dibona (Open Source Manager at Google and one of my favorite geek-heroes), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google) ... the list goes on and on.

Despite the incredibly interesting audience at FooCamp, the opportunities, the desire to evangelize Drupal, the quest for what to do after my PhD, and the many friends I have in San Francisco, I can't help but feel out of place already. Maybe this feeling stems from the fact that I have to leave my pregnant wife behind for a couple days, I don't know. One thing is for sure: life has been a chain of unexpected and often incredible events that keep taking me by surprise. I'm grateful for that. :)