EMFCamp is amazing

In 2024, on my mastodon feed, someone posted asking for more people to volunteer talks about train topics at a tech festival I hadn't heard of.

I did some quick research and turns out there's a decent overlap between Monkigras attenders and EMFCamp, and Monkigras is one of the very few tech conferences I advocate anyone attending if they can.

So... I'd spent many years traveling for work by train, either personally or on behalf of public sector clients. I had a "bank" of fare hacks I regularly had picked up on and used. I was split ticketing before all the websites had a nice simple button to do it for you! And in order to understand these, I had to understand how the various railway entities in the uk relate to each other. In addition, working with uk public sector clients for so long, there's a whole wealth of public policy, politics and law I have been involved in helping implement via the software side.

Even better, I was fairly new and green working with a railway vendor, with senior engineers who had lived through this on the inside, so who better to ensure my self-taught content was accurate?

I submitted a CFP not expecting anything and... I was accepted. I frantically booked flights to the UK, recruited my sister into coming.

I was scared I was not knowledgeable enough, despite finding evidence that I was putting up posts on tumblr on the topic in the 00s. I also had no idea how much knowledge to assume from the audience. I realised that although this is likely an audience comfortable with split ticketing, the detail of why specifically it works, especially on the interesting cases still not mainstream like off peak definitions and stopping short, can be a fun story to tell.

My sister and I went all in - got hold of DECT handsets, several rolls of fun gaffa tape, volunteered for as much as we could, tried to find all the various online comms areas eg Discord, matrix, irc... wandered round and played with every personal project we could get our hands on, asking tonnes of questions.

It was genuinely amazing. The talks were secondary to the huge community and maker spirit, with coding, robotics, machinery, fabric work, even candle making! Most of my favourite moments were serendipitous, eg listening to a young child talk about their project that they'd decorated using parts of toys, discovering that someone had accidentally left radioactive material at the donate and swap area, accidentally roping in others to decorate their DECT handsets with the crafts materials we'd brought.

Towards the end of the last day, I participated in an impromptu event that I feel would lose its poignancy if described here, but I have never felt so psychologically safe and open yet present in a group of new people.

I end with: LASERS. So many amazing light displays and lasers.