Ten tips to help you enjoy GTUG Campouts
Be ambitious. Hello World apps don't win cool swag.
Know thy limits. Having an ambitious idea is great but if you can't execute it all, scale it down to what is doable in the weekend.
Have at least Plans A, B, and C. In our project, what was orginally an afterthought add-on turned out to be the centerpiece of the demo.
If you're getting more than 6 hours of sleep each night, you're not doing it right. 45 hours is not nearly as much time as you think.
Go outside and walk around for a couple minutes ever so often. After spinning in mud for an hour or so, a quick walk around the Googleplex can make the solution come to you. Not recommended at night when the doors lock behind you.
Check you veganism at the door. All those preservatives in that junk food keeps you going. Sure, there'll be rabbit food during meals but otherwise embrace the junk food.
Arrive early on day one to scope out the locations of outlets. A laptop doing a bunch of builds on battery power is an uphappy laptop.
Learn to sense when a Shirley or another photog is near. That way you can force their "candid" photos to feature your good angles hiding the bags under your eyes and acne you got from eating so much junk food.
Be interesting enough to be drawn by David Newman(@dnsf). I loved his drawing of me at OpenSocial weekend so much that I use it as my twitter photo.
Be flexible. / Get in where you fit in. If I were doing a project in my free time I might do it using Groovy in some shape or fashion. During GTUG Campout, people gravitate towards their programming LCD. In my case, it's Java. If your pitched idea doesn't attract a team, join someone else's. If your idea overlaps another team's, consider joining forces or at the very least co-locating so that you can work through common problems. One of the other teams had an idea that was only slightly similar to my team's but if we had partnered, we could have been that more awesome.