“So shortly after a visit to the USA for OSCON and back to Australia, I jumped back on a plane and headed towards Seattle for LinuxCon America to give a talk about Open Source and Australian Government Policy. The trip was great and I also managed to fit in a flight to LA to visit a friend who works who NASA and lives in the Hollywood Mountains.
The conference was my second American LinuxCon attending and talking, and the experience as the previous one’s was fantastic. I got to catch up with some old friends, discuss the latest Linus Trends. Oh I did see the HP talk “”The Machine”” a highly hardware nerd talk and defiantly one of my highlights. If you have not heard about “”The Machine”” I suggest you take a look, https://www.labs.hpe.com/the-machine seriously worth the read and follow, introduces a new way of accessing memory and presents and interesting change/challenge to modern day programming.
The conference parties and also extra “”Sponsor Drink Evenings”” where quite fun, meet alot of people and discussed alot of roles. For some reason Seattle to me seemed more heavy on about the “”Hiring Parties”” but it also felt like a big push by Amazon and Microsoft, or maybe they targeted me because I was hanging around with Paul Berg [Amazon – OpenSource] he seemed to have kidnapped me this conference with discussions of Open Source Licenses and hilarious stories about his “”questionable”” patents.
The Women in Linux lunch was lovely and the quality of the swag was alot higher then I expected. It has been interesting to see that each year with LinuxCon it has been a steady increase of women in attendance. This year they hired out a cafe and then filled out all the seating areas, so I was pretty stoked to see so many faces there and happy to see few seats left.
I really do enjoy LinuxCon America, I am not sure if I will be able to attend next year however I know it is an event I will be back at and recommend to all types of people, even though it is quite developer centric there is also talks around Open Source business and community practices. Oh I must also give a shout out to the tshirt design, as someone who has lived in Seattle I thought this shirt design covered the feeling of the city quite well.