OSCON 2012
For some years now I’ve been inspired to travel to the United States to attend the Open Source Convention OSCON in Portland. I hoped to learn what new open source tools and resources developers from around the world are using to get their work done.
This year I made the journey and it was well worth it. About 3000 people attended over the five days and they are all so passionate about open source software. Most are developers but all are working with open source software in one way or another. Everyone is very willing to share their skills and experience.
A main focus of the conference was Open Stack (http://www.openstack.org/) which is an open source alternative to Amazon’s cloud services and the primary thing I hoped to learn about when leaving Melbourne. Open Stack is being embraced by many businesses and the founders from NASA have moved on to build their own businesses that use Open Stack technologies. As some speakers discussed there is still a lot of work to do before Open Stack has all the features required to be a complete cloud services platform but it’s looking very promising.
I also got a lot out of talks about PHP, Vim, Twitter’s Bootcamp and system performance tuning.
I also met lots of interesting people. Sitting down to lunch I found myself sitting next to Sebastion Bergman who created PHPUnit and on another day with an Open Stack founder Josh McKenty. I also met some Ubuntu community members and some people behind MySQL (and MariaSQL), Linode, Rackspace and many more.
Everyone is pushing the open source movement in the same direction. Forward. It was a fantastic event and I hope to attend next year. However tomorrow in day one of Defcon which I’m very excited about.