C4 is Teh Bomb

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Hi - I'm Olof.  I guess I'm the first "guest blogger" on MacMojo.  I'm a developer on the Mac Office team, and for the weekend, I'm in Chicago at C4.

I have a really strong sense of what C4 is going to be like, even though I've never been to one before.  In fact this is the first one.  There is no precedent for who will come, what the atmosphere will be like.  There's no commercial entity  driving it forward like Apple at WWDC, no hip branding to overhype the experience (sorry, Wolf's tie doesn't qualify).

Why do I have such confidence about the weekend experience ahead?  Trust. Relationships.  Peer-to-peer.  That is, I trust Jon to put on a good show, I value the people I meet at an event like this, and information from peers about technology is completely different from information from technology promoters.

I met Jon "Wolf" Rentzsch when he had just started up the NorthWest of Us Programmer's SIG. He was a lot less Wolf-y then.  He cared about people and technology.  We talked shop. Extolled the virtures of scripting, of WebObjects, of source control.  He knew cool things about threading.  But more than anything, the Programmer's SIG was a time to revel in cool stuff.  He made walking to get oily disgusting pizza an exhilarating event.

When MacHack ceaased to be, a lot of us felt a void -- and I'm hoping -- expecting -- this to be something to fill that space.  Apparently, a number of other people feel the same way.  I hear a lot of people disappointed that they couldn't make it.  Did they have the same preconceptions about C4 as I did?

Talking with folk here, it seems like they most value the community that they expect will be there.  Who is that?  People who trust Jon to collect an interesting group of people and organize a fun time. 

So far, so good.  At dinner, some people are having problems with NetNewsWire, and Brent Simmons is providing tableside tech support.  Too cool.

And, Wolf doesn't disappoint with his keynote.  Lots of Web 2.0 mockery mixed with Apple developer geekery.  And just like I expected, Wolf delivers on all my preconceptions.  He wants C4 to be a sponsorship free event, high on community bonding and honest technology discussions.  And he shares the secret to the Cheetah-era BombApp.app, bringing down the house with a demo of how to reimplement it in Cocoa with 0 lines of code.  More soon.

And I do hope I can figure out how to do hyperlinks on these posts.  C4 needs a link.  So does Wolf's tie.