We combined the Fission team retreat with a selection of remote presentations around decentralized web topics.

The Fission team is distributed (as of this writing, Vancouver, Canada; Nixa, Missouri, USA; Ghent, Belgium) so we make sure to meet in person every three months or so. Our last retreat was in Berlin, where we launched the Fission CLI tool and Live services.

This time around we made our way to Fernie, BC, a small mountain town with a great ski hill that is in the south-east corner of British Columbia, close to the Alberta border. We flew in to Calgary and then drove about 3 hours to Fernie.

Blaine and Brooke on the Fairy Creek Trail

Why Fernie? Well, our friend Blaine Cook @blaine, who you may better know as the original Lead Developer at Twitter, grew up around Fernie and was going to be based there working remotely. When we caught up in Vancouver, it turns out he's been thinking about content addressing and portable computing in a very similar way to Brooke's ideas.

And so, we picked a small, snowy, BC mountain town as the location of our retreat. Thanks to Blaine and Natasha for showing us around Fernie, including lots of fun snow activities!

Fernie Internet Next

We originally had the idea to invite some other people to join us in skiing and decentralized web talks, but ended up running out of time for organizing. And, it turns out folks from Portugal don't like -20C (we'll get you next time Moxy Studio!).

So instead we reached out to some people working on interesting tech in the broader decentralized web space and invited them to give remote presentations.

We ended up with 5 talks across two days, with Brooke & Blaine broadcasting from Fernie, others joining us remotely from elsewhere in North America.

We recorded all the talks and added some links and notes, which are all available on the agenda on the Fission Talk forum, as well as links to the individual videos and talks below:

Brooke Zelenka: Universal Substrate

Dave Hrycyszyn: Mixnets with Nym Technologies

Evan "Rabble" Henshaw-Plath: Planetary & Secure Scuttlebutt

Blaine Cook: Edition, Content Addressing and Compute

Peter van Hardenberg: Local first software

It was a great experience to learn directly from the creators of these tools and protocols. Stay tuned for more remote presentations, we're going to be inviting people in to speak, and talk about our own progress, on a regular basis.

Fernie Experiences

To finish up, here are a handful of photos of our retreat, the location where we presented from, and various activities in and around Fernie.

From top left, clockwise: Fernie condo home base, condo back window view, Natash and Blaine and the snowshoeing group, cooking some chickens together, Dave from Nym Tech presenting, Blaine and Steven presenting, Fernie Ghostriders Junior A hockey game (Steven's first hockey game), Boris in front of Sparwood's "Titan" world's largest truck