As seems to be the tradition, I thought I would bash together a few of my thoughts following Electromagnetic Field 2024.
EMF is a wonderful weekend in an internet-connected field, that welcomes miscellaneous nerds to come and camp and just sort of Do Cool Stuff for a weekend. Loads of people bring projects to hack on over the weekend, there are side quests to play with, and there are hundreds of amazing talks and workshops about all sorts of things. It’s a very strange place to be, in the most delightful possible way. In the words of the man behind it all, Jonty Wareing:
I can’t really summarise everything that happens at EMF, because it’s impossible to experience it all over the course of a weekend. I only managed to see a handful of the talks I had hoped to see — which is OK, because most talks are recorded — and I didn’t manage to take part in any of the various Capture the Flag-type games that were going on across the site, purely because there was So Much Happening.
There was real-life Microsoft Paint:1
There was a musical Tesla coil:2
And there was a game of Asteroids projected on the side of a hill with LASERS!3
My favourite thing about EMF, and ‘hacker camps’ in general, is exactly this — and exactly what I said at the beginning — that people Just Make Cool Stuff. You get to leave behind your day job, come to this weird small town of tents for a weekend, and just make things that entertain you or show off your skills. There should be more opportunities to express creativity in this sort of way, purely for entertainment value, and not because it is in any way useful.4
Mind, having said that, I did do a fun talk about my day job.
Whilst there were a few bugs with the event (not including the spiders), that’s to be expected with events of this scale, and there wasn’t anything so significant as to detract from my enjoyment of the festival. As seems to also be the common theme, I came back to my normal life with a renewed burst of creative energy, and I can’t wait for 2026.
Although next time, I might not camp so close to Null Sector.