Time tested methods of bonding. No no, not superglue and duct tape. There’s a lot you can learn about people before they’ve had coffee and after they’ve had a drink. Email, irc,and electronic mediums are fabulous for keeping us connected and for making connections we otherwise might never make. But there’s so much about a person that doesn’t click until you’ve met them. This morning I met in the flesh two fellow O’Reilly bloggists: Peter Wiggin and chromatic, sporting an amazing code monkey tshirt. Which leads me to the next benefit…
You can more easily steal their stuff. Now, this is only partly about petty thievery. It’s also about a bigger, better type of theft - Open Source People. Where better to learn the tricks of how to be a wizard than from the wizards themselves. Mark-Jason Dominus had that idea in his Tricks of the Wizards presentation. There’s a lot that makes an alpha geek, mjd can give you the technical side in his talk, but talking to him over a drink can help reveal that je ne sai quoi.
Buckle your seatbelt.
Eat more branez It’s easier to hunt when the prey is in the same building.
