Google Mentors Summit, Day 0

Just came from the pre-summit dinner that grew from 10 people to 60 -- all participants of the Google SoC Mentors Summit.

Finally met Angela Byron (webchick), Simon Hobbs (sime) and Rok Zlender (rok), the nice Drupal uber-coders.

From the noise in the room, you could tell that the dinner was a success!

Here's what felt really good. Every time people found out I was from the Drupal project, they'd say, "Really? Oh I LOVE Drupal!" or-- "Our website is running on Drupal!"

Geek Culture at Work. The mode of introduction is to ask for the project they are working on and not really your name. So I'd say I'm from Drupal and Wolf would say he's from GRASS GIS. The name of the open source project gets more priority than the names of the people.

In our table for instance, our introductions go something like: they're from Drupal, they're from Haiku OS, they're from Etherboot.

I had a dinner of steak, mashed potatos, salad and vanilla ice cream for dessert (with real vanilla beans, so they said). Cost: $44. My first expense in dollars and pretty steep. One mentor quipped: "That could feed a family!"

This means I should probably live on instant noodles for the rest of the week hehe.

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Update: Angie tipped me off on a hotel that's cheaper than where we are right now. So I've booked a room there for tomorrow evening.

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