Sun Tech Days in Brazil
Sun kicked off 2009's Tech Days season in Brazil on Sept 29 and 30. The event had three tracks: Java and Social Computing, MySQL and Productivity and OpenSolaris, plus a hand-on lab running in parallel with the talks.
I had a great time there, specially since it's the perfect opportunity to drive OpenSolaris adoption and do active work to grow the community. I could sense people's interest on OpenSolaris first hand, which is great since a lot of the technologies that make OS interesting are not very well known in BR. Really, anything that gets ZFS, DTrace, FMA, SMF ..all the goodies in front of developers and general IT folks in Brazil is great.
If you're not familiar with how open source is important in BR, trust me, it's huge and in all levels (from big companies, gov't, students to poor communities). Add to that the fact that the IT business is growing strongly, the economy is more solid now than it's been in the past twenty years - demanding infra-structure and the best software solutions - and you have a perfect momentum to grow OpenSolaris adoption. If you're interested, try to get down there for FISL next year, it's the biggest open source conference in the country and you'll see what I'm talking about with your own eyes.
During one of the keynotes, Sun gave out the awards for the OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards. Three members of our community, Ricardo Severo, Diogo Bohm and Marcelo Leal walked out of the room with those huge checks :)
I was fortunate to be on the line up for talks on IPS, ZFS and High Availability, and being a native Portuguese speaker, booth duty during the entire event. The IPS talk went very smoothly, which is expected since it's so easy to set up a server and add packages. Try
svcadm enable pkg/server
and then go to http://localhost on your browser. That's all you need to get a repository up and running.
The ZFS lab was actually a talk (I was told we were using the HOL room for lack of space). The slide deck was very comprehensive, covering all aspects of ZFS plus demos at the end. And since I encouraged people to ask questions during the talks, I ran about 20 minutes over the time slot. I thought it went really well, I'm more than confident that a good amount of people were convinced to try/switch to ZFS. The High Availability talk went fine.. again a bit too much content in the slide deck. But just covering SMF and FMA was great. People also seemed impressed with OHAC and how easy it is to create agents and get their apps running on top of OHAC.
For the lightning talk spot, I did a quick talk about OpenSolaris in Brazil and the br.opensolaris.org portal, Ronaldo Prass talked about OpenSolaris for the desktop, Ricardo Severo talked about SMF and the the three of us plus Vitorio Sassi did a "Everything you wanted to know about OpenSolaris and never had anyone to ask to" talk, answering something like 20-30 questions from the audience. That one was really cool.
Another great thing was meeting loads of people from different parts of Sun, some of which I had known for a while only through email, and seeing again friends I don't get to see as often as I'd like. Good stuff.
