What a great first day for me at O’Reilly OSCon 2012. While I am a veteran of a few Velocity conferences, this is my first time at OSCon. Along those lines, I haven’t been to Oregon in twenty years, and I’ve never been to Portland. But, I have heard great things about this city from some friends who live in the Northwest. Thus far, both the conference and city are living up to the hype.
The early Wednesday plenary sessions were great, highlighted by a fantastic and galvanizing presentation from Tim O’Reilly. His thoughts about Open Source changing the world are inspiring. Other signage at the conference, describing how Open Source is improving outcomes in Africa or is helping the environment, reinforces his message. After the opening plenary keynotes, I spent a few hours in the Go Daddy booth. I relish these opportunities to engage the community; learning, interacting, and gathering feedback from the best in our industry. Thanks to all who stopped by!
After lunch, I attended sessions about distributed technologies, big data, and analytics - specifically HBase and Zookeeper, two technologies that we are interested in pursuing further at Go Daddy. Following another stint at our booth, I sat in on, “What Makes a Great Open API” by John Musser from ProgrammableWeb. What a tremendous presentation from a domain expert on a topic that is very pertinent to several current initiatives at Go Daddy. It was a great day full of quality presentations and experiences, but this session was the highlight of the day for me.
I went to dinner with a few coworkers at the Screen Door, a restaurant that specializes in Southern cuisine. Collard greens, smoked chicken and andouille jambalaya , mac ‘n cheese, and fried chicken were in order – nothing we had disappointed. We closed out the day by joining many others at the OpenStack Party at the Spirit of ’77, a fantastic watering hole dedicated to local sports teams and legends.
As I write this, I’ve got two more days of OSCon to look forward to. If you’re not here, you should be! If you are, talk to me or one of my colleagues down at the Go Daddy booth or catch me in between breakouts.
