Category: conferences

I spoke at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Tokyo, Japan. The event was co-located with the Automotive Linux Summit. This post is a (very delayed) report of the event as well as the trip to Japan. Amye and I did an updated version of the Linuxcon Berlin talk to a Tokyo audience. It had some audience, but it’s time we retired this talk.

Flying to Tokyo was pleasant. Bombay has a direct flight to Narita with ANA. I got one of the emergency row seats, so I didn’t have much of a view. Narita airport had the most efficient immigration and customs I’ve seen. I was out of the airport in 30 mins. I planned it out so I took the Keisei Access Express to Shimbashi and then the Yurikamome line to the hotel. Despite not knowing any Japanese, I could find my way. I was quite exhausted when I got to the hotel and I wasn’t looking forward to the 3 pm check-in. Luckily, the room was already ready. I considered ordering room service, but I went exploring at the mall nearby. The place had English menus and very nice food.

I had no connectivity trouble despite the lack of a local phone connection. Most metro stations and malls have free internet. I was using Telegram, Twitter, and Slack all the time. The Hilton Wi-Fi was pretty strong too.

I spent the rest of the day catching up on sleep. That night I made the mistake of going to bed with the curtains open. I jumped awake next morning thinking I’d slept in. It turns out that the sunrise in Tokyo is around 0430. So what felt like 0900 to me was actually 0500. It took a while to go back to sleep. I spent the morning finishing up our slides. Then, I went out exploring a bit of Tokyo and stationery shopping at Itoya. I wanted to do more touristy things, but carrying around bags of stationery wasn’t fun. By the time I got back, dropped off the stuff at the hotel, I was too tired to go back out exploring. I roamed around Odaiba instead and went hunting for the conference venue. I’m glad I did because I got lost. I found the venue, picked up my badge and met fellow Red Hatters who were setting up the booth.

Our talk was on the first day of the conference, which was a good thing. I was stress-free after the first half of the day. I met Arun at the event which was a pleasant surprise. The rest of the conference provided an opportunity for Bex and I talk to about documentation. We’re working on adopting the same documentation tool.

The Automotive Linux Summit had fantastic demos. I felt like the booths for the Open Source Summit aren’t as fantastic.. The ALS folks had displays and car simulators that should show how their displays work. I helped with the booth duty for a couple of shifts, but, again, we didn’t have enough interesting things to demo. While walking around those booths, I had idea for a Gluster demo. If all works out, I plan on putting that up for the next Open Source Summit in Prague.

Out of the talks that I attended, the ones that stood out are:

• Jim’s talk about CentOS and ARM.
• James Bottomley about the APIs in Linux for container storage.
• Federica Teodori’s talk about OpenSUSE’s evolution.
• Daniel Jeffery’s talk about Let’s Encrypt.

Image credit: Linux Foundation Speaker Party Lexus Demo (license)

The DevConf CZ conference has been going on for a few years now. India got it’s first edition this year in May. I got looped into helping the conference over the course of the month leading up to the conference. The first thing I did was to buy the domain name and register the Twitter account. I was also going around asking people to submit talks for the CFP. I was also asked to help edit the content for the conference. This made it impossible for me to talk about anything, since we did not want a conflict of interest.

The @redhatindia booth is getting ready at #DevConfin pic.twitter.com/XcxL2uLHs2

— nigelb (@nigelbabu) May 11, 2017

During the talk selection process, we first looked at the talks and their content. In case a talk proposal wasn’t focused on the right audience, we got in touch with the author and asked for an edit. For this event, our target was sysadmins. We made an effort to give a few slots to first-time speakers. This is something I’m committed to doing if I continue to help with the event. In fact, I’d like to do more. For example, speaking workshops and help with designing presentations.

We had several missteps at this stage already. Our CFP announcements was quite late. We could have had a lot more people propose to speak at the event if they had enough notice. Some speakers did not like the process were they had to give the talk to the selection committee. After this event, I’ll admit I’m a big believer in this process. It’s easy to filter out talks that sound good but aren’t great this way. What we did wrong in this process is timing. We did the rehearsals as late as one week before the event. For the next edition, I’d like to move the schedule so talks are final at least 60 to 90 days before the event.

#devconfin At the booth – the obligatory photo! pic.twitter.com/NB29XnPfu1

— DevConf.in (@devconfin) May 12, 2017

I arrived late night the day before the event because of date conflicts. On day 1, there were only going to be workshops for Devconf, so I didn’t have to do much. The Ansible workshop had high demand but few seats. That ended up being a bit challenging for both the trainers and the attendees. Some people who RSVP’d may not have shown up on time and some people who didn’t RSVP at all showed up. We make a decision to say that the people who were there at 10 mins past the start time could sit at the tables. Everyone else would have to sit in the chairs at the back. They’re welcome to take part but the facilitators won’t be able to help them at their place. If we do this again, I’d either charge for the workshops or commit to a first-come first-serve basis. We inconvenienced a lot of people by our decisions, but we did what we thought would serve the event best. I couldn’t stay awake after the first tea break, so I headed back to the office and then finally back to the hotel for a nap.

A large shout-out to the folks doing behind the scenes work like the video, the audio, the hall monitors, and passing the mic for the Qs! pic.twitter.com/lpTriMfYQR

— DevConf.in (@devconfin) May 12, 2017

The second day, I was much better refreshed and energetic thanks to a good amount of sleep. We had a full track for DevConf and a long list of things that could go wrong. We started off the day being behind time but over the course of the day we were running early. The day ended with Jim’s keynote which was fantastic. We lost a couple of videos due to a human error/problem with the recording infrastructure. All the other videos from the conference are up on YouTube.