So after presenting FireFoxOS talk at LinuxCon Chicago and getting an overwhelming good response I decided to put the talk forward for LinuxConf Australia. So I got accepted for the talk at LinuxConf Australia which was awesome and a humbling experience.
This year (2015) it was in Auckland, New Zealand and yes I had never been to New Zealand before apart from a short stop over on the way home from Canada. So I was pretty excited for a couple of reasons, I missed Perth, it had been way too long since I had seen some friends and I was presenting a talk.
The conference was fantastic and I must say sorry all but hands down the dinner in Auckland was the best we had a Steam Punk themed evening. There was also an old telephone exchange exhibition there and Yinette and myself and some old fun phone freakin. The costumes and background was utterly subculture and all in all a great night spent with good friends.
The mini-confs and talks where as always jammed packed with technical knowledge that makes you want to go home and get straight into finding and problem for your new solution. The venue was great and in a central location which meant it was nice and easy for people to meet up in the evenings.
I gave my talk after having a morning of corrupted slides and being unable to download them from anywhere but slide-share, then due to my Libre Office it seemed the downloaded copy from slide-share did not format properly. So I had a jumbled start to my talk and I was having to use two screens with one pointer on slide-share online slides in full screen mode. Anyways that aside I think I ended up recovering my nerves so it was a shaking start and certainly not one of my best talks :/
I did learn that it is one thing to speak in-front of a room full of strangers with a couple of friends. It is another thing to talk to a room full of people whom the large majority are not just friends but also peers whom you respect and on a technology skill set level look up to. On a positive note they all told me that the talk was great and they learnt something.
All in all as always LinuxConf was awesome, fantastic, great, full of information, a place to see old friends and somewhere where you will always make new ones. Geelong, I can not wait. lcabythebay.org.au