This year has been a nice for socializing with nerds. Attending conferences is something that can get tiresome, if the content is something you do not find interesting or stimulating. Thankfully, I have no required conferences, so I can be choosy (schedules permitting). Naturally open source and languages would top the list of places to attend.
First off, was hanging out with the KDE folks in San Francisco, CA for CampKDE – April 4,5 2011. There were a number of good talks, and a great opportunity to shake the hands of names that I have seen around, as well as meeting many new folks. The kde-promo team has a YouTube channel, that they have published all the talks and interviews to. http://www.youtube.com/user/kdepromo
The talk I gave there is titled “Slackware: Quickly and Easily Manage Your KDE SC Hacking.” You can get the slides in [PDF] or [ODP], plus the videos posted on the kde-promo channel have the full talk (youtube.com/watch?v=Qs7vR3POHeo), as well as an interview afterwards by Wade Olson (youtube.com/watch?v=YIpUmPul1i4).
Next, was down to Spartanburg, SC for the SouthEast Linux Fest (SELF) – June 10-12, 2011.
This is the third year that I have attended SELF, and second time to speak, but what differentiated this year from any other speaking engagement (in the past, or distant future), was that it was a talk title “Slackware Demystified”, and none other than the founder of Slackware Linux, Patrick Volkerding was not only in attendance, but sitting on the front row! The slides from this presentation are available in [HTML] or [PDF]. Unfortunately, the videos have not been published yet. Hopefully they will actually get them published, unlike the previous two years…
Lastly … so far, was a local conference, that I did not speak at, only attended. JrubyConf – August 3-5, 2011. While I use MRI Ruby much more than JRuby, this conference was a great way to be around and hear from many brilliant folks (Like Wayne Seguin, Charles Nutter (headius), Nick Sieger, and Jim Weirich, to name a few), plus I felt that I needed to make up for missing out on RubyConf taking place in Baltimore, MD.
The KDE folks strongly encouraged making it to the DesktopSummit, which was hosted in Berling, Germany this year. While it was surely appetising to think of attending, it did not work out this time. It would have been nice to shake hands with some fellow contributors, like Eric Hameleers (alienBob). Better luck next year.
All good times, I look forward to next year, or event the rest of 2011.
Feel free to leave feedback on the talks.
Take care,
vb