On Wednesday, OSCon really goes into high gear (and the wifi croaks) at OSCon. The people that aren’t going to the tutorials all arrive, and aren’t yet sluggish from the late-night vendor parties and BOFs.
The keynotes were OK, and after that, I listened to Keith Packard talk about the future of X. Then it was off to finish the preparation for my own talk on Linux on the corporate desktop. It was the first time I spoke at OSCon, and it seems to have gone well. I keep running into people that were at the talk and thought of some more questions — and of course I chatted with a number of people right after as well. There are a number of other companies that are planning on doing what we’ve done, or even started down the implementation path already. It’s some effort making something of OSCon quality (Damian Conway suggests something like 10 hours preparing for every 1 hour presenting — I didn’t do that), but I’m glad I did.
The Expo Hall opened Wednesday as well. Met some interesting folks there — Open Lina, a company that sells Linux hardware, an Open Source groupware product I hadn’t heard of before (they are apparently working on Debian Packages too), and some others I can’t remember right now…
Tuesday I had dinner at Andina, a Peruvian restaurant, with fellow Haskellers Bryan O’Sullivan and Don Stewart — the first time the three of us Real World Haskell folks met in one place.
Today brought Nat Torkington’s excellent keynote, and also r0ml’s great talk this afternoon (“I started this talk in 2003, and it’s run a bit long.”) Another great time for some networking in the hallways and expo hall. One of the LinuxFest Northwest folks had attended my talk, happened to see me as I was stuffing one of the may free t-shirts that vendors were giving out into my laptop bag (by afternoon, they were getting quite in your face about it), and struck up a conversation.
Went for sushi over lunch with a couple of folks from #oscon on IRC, then dinner with Debian folks.
Been a busy week, but met lots of people. I didn’t go to as many talks as I planned because I was so busy talking to people — guess that means the conference was a hit.