{"id":105,"date":"2008-02-12T17:36:05","date_gmt":"2008-02-12T21:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/newblog\/?p=105"},"modified":"2008-02-12T17:36:05","modified_gmt":"2008-02-12T21:36:05","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/?p=105","title":{"rendered":"SCALE Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, SCALE<\/a> 6x is now over! It was a great conference, as always. For those of you who don’t know, SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo) is a grass-roots, volunteer-run Linux and Open Source conference.<\/p>\n

[Disclaimer: I was one of the co-founders of the original SCALE. After the first one, I realized I couldn’t continue to put the time in required to be a chair person or other significant organizer, but I remain a volunteer on the day of (and I re-wrote the registration system for SCALE 2x which was used through SCALE 5x).]<\/p>\n

So, obviously, I’m a bit biased, but speaking as objectively as I can, SCALE is a truly unique and amazing conference. It’s run and driven completely by volunteers – no company has any say in how the conference works. It really is of<\/strong>, by<\/strong>, and for<\/strong> the community<\/em>. This gives it a very special feel – it’s not corporate or covered in ads. The speakers are not marketing people pushing products, but instead technical people discussing technical things. Yet, it’s a large, professional 3-day, 1500-attendee conference!<\/p>\n

This year was no exception. But this year had its own new special qualiy. The first thing I noticed this year was a significant increase in the female populace. On any given year in the past, there’s maybe a small handful of women. Less than a percent, to be sure. Last year, SCALE joined forces with other groups to present three mini-conferences<\/a> on the Friday preceding the conference, one of which was Women in Open Source<\/a>. Last year, this didn’t make a huge difference in the number of women in attendance on Saturday and Sunday. Perhaps those attending the mini-conference didn’t stay for the rest. Or perhaps WiOS didn’t get the attendance it would have liked. I’m not sure.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this year WiOS was more advertised, or better attended, or perhaps it inspired the women to stay for the rest of SCALE. Whatever the reason, there was a noticeable percentage of women in the audience. I’d say… maybe 5%. From the probably .02% previous years, this is a significant change.<\/p>\n

There’s a lot of talk about the lack of women in engineering and computer science related fields, and I think this is a great sign. Seeing women not only at the conference but having fun and enjoying it, and being a part of it was fantastic.<\/p>\n

In fact, one of the keynote speakers this year was Stormy Peters<\/a> speaking about whether companies paying open source developers are actually hurting the community. It was an incredibly insightful and fun talk. It should give anyone who goes “but I don’t get why open source works” a useful perspective, and I think it should be required viewing for any executive at a technology company.<\/p>\n

I should note that Jono Bacon<\/a>‘s keynote on the state of the Linux Desktop and what that really means was also spectacular. In fact, I think this year’s keynotes were the best we’ve ever had.<\/p>\n

If I had to pick my top talks, I’d say the two keynotes, plus Allison Randal<\/a>‘s talk on Parrot<\/a> and Luke Kanies<\/a>‘s talk on Puppet<\/a>. I mean no slight to any of the other speakers; I saw other great talks, and missed countless more. These 4 just were just my favorite.<\/p>\n

In addition, I presented a Birds of a Feather<\/a> (BoF) on configuration management along with others. I was there (along with my friend and old boss from Ticketmaster), Rafi Khardalian, to talk about Spine, Provision, and Onall<\/a>. Luke Kanies was there to talk about Puppet, and some guys from Blade Logic where there to talk about their configuration management solution. I was actually a bit worried about this BoF turning into a fight, but I sat down with Luke after his talk to discuss our respective solutions and the BoF went extremely well.<\/p>\n

I also spent some time hanging out at my new employer, Google’s, booth meeting some of the other Googlers. Everyone there was excited to see me, treated me like family, and invited me to head out to the Santa Monica office to meet the team there before I head out to Switzerland. Thanks to everyone there for being so awesome!<\/p>\n

So if you weren’t at SCALE this year, mark your calendar for next year, you don’t want to miss it again!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, SCALE 6x is now over! It was a great conference, as always. For those of you who don’t know, SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo) is a grass-roots, volunteer-run Linux and Open Source conference. [Disclaimer: I was one of the co-founders of the original SCALE. After the first one, I realized I couldn’t continue to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}