You may remember that I used not to be a fan of travel, and that for a while I was absolutely scared by the idea of flying. This has clearly not been the case in a while, given that I’ve been working for US companies and traveling a lot of the time.
One of the side effects of this is that I enjoy the “conference circuit”, to the point that I’m currently visiting three to four conferences a year, some of which for VideoLAN and others for work, and in a few cases for nothing in particular. This is an interesting way to keep in touch with what’s going on in the community and in the corporate world out there.
Sometimes, though, I wish I had more energy and skills to push through my ideas. I find it curious how nowadays it’s all about Docker and containers, while I jumped on the LXC bandwagon quite some time ago thanks to Tiziano, and because of that need I made Gentoo a very container-friendly distribution from early on. Similarly, O’Reilly now has a booklet on static site generators which describe things not too far from what I’ve been doing since at least 2006 for my website, and for xine’s later on. Maybe if I wasn’t at the time so afraid of traveling I would have had more impact on this, but I guess (to use a flying metaphor) I lost my slot there.
To focus bit more on SCaLE14x in particular, and especially about Cory Doctorow’s opening keynote, I have to say tht the conference is again a good load of fun. Admittedly I rarely manage to go listening to talks, but the amount of people going in and out of the expo floor, and the random conversation struck there are always useful.
In the case of Doctorow’s keynote, while he’s (as many) a bit too convinced, in my opinion, that he has most if not all the answers, his final argument was a positive one: don’t try to be “pure” (as FSF would like you to be), instead hedge your bets by contributing (time, energy, money) to organizations and projects that work towards increasing your freedom. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to hear Cory name, earlier in that talk, VLC and Handbrake — although part of the cotnext in which he namechecked us is likely going to be a topic for a different post, once I have something figured out.
My current trip brings me to San Francisco tonight, for Enigma 2016, and on this note I would like to remember to conferencegoers that, while most of us are aiming for a friendly and relaxed atmosphere, there is some opsec you should be looking into. I don’t have a designated conference laptop (just yet, I might get myself a Chromebook for it) but I do have at least a privacy screen. I’ve seen more than a couple corp email interfaces running on laptops while walking the expo floor this time.
Finally, I need to thank TweetDeck for their webapp. The ability to monitor hashtags, and particularly multiple hashtags from the same view is gorgeous when you’re doing back-to-back conferences (#scale14x, #enigma2016, #fosdem.) I know at least one of them is reading, so, thanks!