Arriving at Bellingham Technical College a bit late, tired from late night geeking out on uBuntu. I arrive in a moist parking lot with a grungy overcast. I walk into “Build a Free As In Freedom Cloud” in Haskell 203 late. Old Spice should sponsor Linuxfest, the man next to me smelt of musk; as if he wrestled a bear into submission.
At 11am, Mark Hinkle took the stage discussing “Crash Course on Open Source Cloud Computing” – this man is a genius. Below is his slideshare.
During lunch, of course I opted for the ribs. I met an instructor at WWU and one of the computer science network admins (their names escape me.) It was interesting talking to them about distributed storage.
After lunch I sat in to listen to Adrian Pike’s Agile development concepts and practices for lean startups talk. It was interesting to hear his experience with project management and collaborating with people online. I think the most insightful bit of information was just how their team handles communication. He mentioned Kanban, Scrum, Basecamp, Test suites, etc.
Coincidentally the Amazon AWS talk was canceled. I am not sure why but I ran into two Amazon network technicals hanging out in the hall ways. I had to sit in on a Drupal talk which was semi informative.
The next thing that happened to me was sitting down next to an asian that had a Google Laptop CR-48. I later found out he actually works for Google and was sent to LinuxfestNW to sit in on the Cloud Networking talks. I’m assuming he’s an engineer. He was sitting with one of the Amazon network technicians. David Nalley talk about open source clouds was very informative and I’d love to experiment with the software he mentioned.
All in all, Linuxfest Northwest was just another nerdcore fest. It’s nice to meet / talk with others that understand the techno jargon.