A few months ago, Emily Dunham and I were chatting about the talks we had recently presented at the Seattle GNU/Linux conference, and the topic of other conferences and events we were interested in speaking at came up. She pointed me to the Southern California Annual Linux Expo (SCALE) and encouraged me to submit one of my talks. Two hours later, I had successfully submitted a proposal to give a talk about the media suite Blender 3D and promptly forgot about the whole thing. A few weeks later I got an email congratulating me on being accepted as a speaker to Scale x13; a few weeks after that I was on a plane to LA getting ready for an eventful (and exhausting) weekend.

My talk on Blender went well: the room was full, the audience asked amazing questions and nobody noticed that I had rewritten most of it the night before.* Lance’s talk on Packer was informative and peaked a lot of people’s interest. Emily’s talk on Human Hacking in Open Source, delivered in the main conference room, was creative, useful and amassed an engaged audience.

In addition to seeing talks on containers, the Maker Movement, containers, DevOps, and containers, I spent most of Friday perusing the Expo Hall. I met up and talked with organizations we help host like Drupal, the Linux Foundation, and Gentoo Linux. I also got to meet developers, community members, and representatives from Cylon.js, Chef, the EFF, Elementary OS, Gobot, Kids on Computers, Mozilla, NixOS, O’Reilly, Salt Stack, and many more. I was humbled and honored to meet leaders and developers of projects which I use and love every day.

Rather than hosting a booth at the event, we opted for a more novel approach to community engagement by designing and sharing OSL Trading Cards for our game “Gotta Catch Them All”. This was hugely popular and by the second and third day of our presence at the conference we had people coming up to us asking for our “card”– and they didn’t mean our business cards.

Scale was an unforgettable event and I hope everybody in the FOSS community gets the chance to experience it.

* This is an industry standard of course, I was just following best practice for conference talk-preparation.

Links:

Scale: http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/13x

Scale Exhibitors: http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/13x/exhibitors

Scale Schedule: http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/13x/schedule