On Sunday, I drove to Harrisburg to meet up with Ryan Duff at the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Convention. This was their first event, covering all sorts of interesting Open Source topics.
Of the six sessions I attended - a packed day - only two were really not of too much interest to me. That’s a pretty good ratio in general, and I suppose that had I chosen to go to other sessions during those time slots instead, I would have had more interest.
The open source virtualization session was good, although I had learned a lot of that information already from a similar session at OLF. Still, there was much better coverage of history and hands-on console configuration of client domains. It would be nice to see someone set up a Xen host and dom0 fully.
The jQuery session was a bit elementary for me, but quite entertaining. There were a couple of things I learned, as with anything so large and flexible as jQuery there’s bound to be something. The presenter was a lot of fun, and I hope to adopt some of his style when doing my own.
The session on scalable system administration was a good one. Leading off with taking the wifi router down remotely, the session leader presented a method for keeping all of your servers configured identically so that maintenance is a cinch. He recommended tools that I’ll have to check out.
Getting involved in an open source project was the topic of the next session I attended. The session was chock full of information and recommendations, but extraordinarily light on real-world examples. I had to muster restraint to keep from citing examples of my own. A lot of good information was conveyed here, and I’m hoping this presenter puts his slides online.
The lunch food was brought in, paid for by a sponsor, and was pretty good. As a matter of fact, there were snacks and drinks pretty much all day. There were also door prizes awarded after every session, of which I won one: a copy of O’Reilly’s Apache Cookbook.
The lacking things in this event were mentions of blogging and social media. I think social media is the new SEO – a fact of life now way overhyped. I’m glad not to have been inundated by it at this open source convention.
Lunch could have been shorter (1.5 hours?) to allow more time between sessions. Also, I’ve been waiting for some event to put on a kind of organized mixer function to get attendees out of their little cliques and meeting each other. It wasn’t surprising to find that omitted here, either.
The event was on the small side for things I’ve attended recently, only around 100 attendees. It was at another ITT Tech, which is a classroom-style building. It’s difficult to crap more people into such a venue. Nonetheless, it was comfortable for the number of attendees.
If they run another one next year, I’ll definitely attend again. It was certainly worth my time, only a short hour’s drive, and the organizers did a good job putting on speakers with compelling presentations.
