This year I have not been able to visit FOSDEM. Funnily enough this confirms the trend of me visiting FOSDEM only on even-numbered years, as I previously skipped 2013 as I was just out for my first and only job interview, and 2011 because of contract related timing. Since I still care for going to an open source conference early in the year, I opted instead for SCaLE, the timing of which fit perfectly my trip to Mountain View. It also allowed me to walk through Hermosa Beach once again.
So Los Angeles again it was, which meant I was able to meet with a few Gentoo developers, a few VideoLAN developers who also came all the way from Europe, and many friends who I have met at various previous conferences. It is funny how I end up meeting some people more often through conferences than I meet my close friends from back in Italy. I guess this is the life of the frequent travelers.
While my presence at SCaLE was mostly a way to meet some of the Gentoo devs that I had not met before, and see Hugo and Ludovic from VideoLAN who I missed at the past two meetings, I did pay some attention to the talks — I wish I could have had enough energy to go to more of them, but I was coming from three weeks straight of training, during which I sat for at least two hours a day in a room listening to talks on various technologies and projects… doing that in the free time too sounded like a bad idea.
What I found intriguing in the program, and in at least one of the talks I was able to attend, was that I could find at least a few topics that I wrote about in the past. Not only now containers are now all the rage, through Docker and other plumbing, but there was also a talk about static site generators, of which I wrote in 2009 and I’ve been using for much longer than that, out of necessity.
All in all, it was a fun conference and meeting my usual conference friends and colleagues is a great thing. And meeting the other Gentoo devs is what sparked my designs around TG4 which is good.
I would like to also thank James for suggesting me to use Tweetdeck during conferences, as it was definitely nicer to be able to keep track of what happened on the hashtag as well as the direct interactions and my personal stream. If you’re the occasional conferencegoer you probably want to look into it yourself. It also is the most decent way to look at Twitter during a conference on a tablet, as it does not require you to jump around between search pages and interactions (on a PC you can at least keep multiple tabs open easily.)