This morning came too early today, as my body clock hadn’t adjusted to Mountain time yet. I was wide awake at 4:30, and couldn’t convince my brain to shut down for an extra hour of needed sleep. (I really shouldn’t complain… Several of the other Fedora folks at the conference arrived at about the same time this morning.) I checked email, caught up on a few RSS feeds, then got ready and headed to the hotel breakfast with Ryan Rix, Karsten Wade, Larry Cafiero. We had a very enjoyable discussion over breakfast.
After breakfast, Ryan Rix and I drove over to the conference. I promptly got pulled into a number of great hallway conversations with both old friends and new Linux users. At 8:30, I snuck over to the Utah CTO Breakfast. It’s a monthly gathering of tech-minded folks (you don’t have to be a CTO to show up!) that get together and chat about current tech topics over bagels and juice. Todays topics included long-term longevity of command-line interfaces, muscle memory, cost of context switching, and various strategies for improving signal to noise ratio in email and social networks. The question that stood out to me was “What if social networks gave people an way to respond anonymously to status updates and form a feedback loop, so that people would (hopefully) learn that they were wasting your time with their status updates?”
After the CTO breakfast, I spent a few minutes talking to some of the SuSE developers from Novell. I also spent some time catching up with a few of the organizers of the conference, and helping out with a few logistics. I also visited the various booths in the exhibit hall and had some great discussions about some of the new features coming in Fedora 14.
After lunch, I went to the presentation by Jake Edge (of LWN.net fame) on Free Software Project Promotion. He did a great job of enumerating the types of things that open source projects often forget to do when trying to promote themselves. I spent the rest of the afternoon popping in and out of several of the other presentations, and going over the slides for my keynote address.
At 4:30pm, I gave the keynote address entitled “Swimming Upstream: How Distributions Help Open Source Communities”. I felt at ease giving the presentation, and I think it was very well received. We had some really good questions during the Q&A sessions — I just wish I could remember them all now.
After my keynote, the conference had a presentation from LaunchUp.org, which is a way for entrepreneurs to get feedback on their ideas and find others interested in helping them move forward. It’s very much modeled after the open source way, and it was fun to watch the companies reach out and get some great feedback.
Now it’s time to grab some nachos and settle in for Ignite Salt Lake.