Saturday August 06, 2005
Saturday August 06, 2005 
Vacation beckons. As much fun as I've had at OSCON 2005 and with all the OpenSolaris community building activities this summer, it's time for me to unplug for two weeks and do some of my favourite things: eat lobster at a much-loved restaurant in Ogunquit (checkout the webcam), hang out for a week in NH, go camping in the mountains, swim in an ice-cold Sierra lake, read-read-read and hopefully, for a few moments at least, do nothing.
What to say about OSCON? I visited and socialized and met with many great people. I did not get to attend nearly enough sessions (and am particularly disappointed to have missed Paul Graham's talk, and Jeremy Zawodny, and Nick Gall, and r0ml, and also Jonathan.) Be sure to read about the cool PHP and DTrace work that Wez and Bryan did - in the midst of a fun OpenSolaris party no less! Big thanks to Laura and Sara for organizing a great party - and to Teresa for getting me hooked up with the OpenSolaris CAB. Al, Casper, Rich, Roy and Simon worked their butts off on OpenSolaris governance during the conference - thanks, guys. They also met with a team of engineers who have been working to define and refine the OpenSolaris development process - which meant that David and JBeck and Mac and Jek3 were in Portland and were able to join my team and the CAB and some of the OpenSolaris engineers for a seafood dinner a la Jake on Wednesday night. Dinner for 18 is guaranteed to be lively - and it was.
I had a great lunch with the ever insightful Stephen O'Grady (who had more influence than he realizes; I don't think my reaction was mixed) and also had the distinct pleasure to spend some time with Nick Gall and Jim McHugh and folks on his team including Lisa and Chris (photo coming later) to talk real-world analogies for software. I ran into Jason Matusow and Stephe Walli - and although I missed his talk, I caught up with r0ml so that he could refresh my memory of the story of his name. Oh, and I got to spend a few minutes with Russ Nelson - no square hats involved! I demo'ed del.icio.us to Steve Lawrence (are you hooked yet, Steve?) and ended up on the same flight back with Liane Praza (an amazingly talented kernel engineer) which meant that the flight felt like it took all of 5 minutes - our conversation was so engaging. Oh - and Keith did not throw any furniture out of any windows. He did do a bang-up job presenting on OpenSolaris, though.
And if your ears were ringing during OSCON, Alan, it's because I picked up a round TUIT for you from chromatic at the perl booth. :-)
I would link to Simon's and Patrick's blogs on OSCON, but they haven't blogged it yet. Perhaps next week?
I'm still figuring out my thoughts about the Women in Open Source panel. Stereotyping can be uncomfortable for me. But boy oh boy was it well attended - by men and women alike. And if the numbers Bernard shared prove accurate - that the number of women in open source is far, far lower than the number of women in software - well, it's worth the conversation to figure out why. Big thanks to Danese for organizing and provoking thought on the topic. And it was a pleasure to spend time with Allison, Mitchell, Alolita, Zaheda and Bernard.
Now - it's vacation-time. Ciao!
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris Technorati Tag: OSCON
(2005-08-06 04:10:59.0) Permalink Comments [2]
