michaeldehaan.net

Last week I flew up to Boston to hit up both Red Hat Summit and USENIX.

I’ve posted about Summit before, so not much new, but my talk with Rafael from the NYSE (mostly Rafael’s talk), drew a standing room only crowd (correction: no standing room at all!), which was nice to see again. Red Hat Summit was pretty much the usual; food was pretty terrible (or perhaps San Diego’s Summit was just delicious) but still enjoyed hanging out with friends very much. I also hosted a Campground session afterwards with some of the Red Hat Systems Management guys. Boston was extremely nice, and even had it’s own mini-heatwave to make us North Carolina folks feel like home. Found a little free time to check out the New England Aquarium, which has a fantastic penguin exhibit. It’s not as fancy as Shedd in Chicago (no Beluga whales or fancy theater show), but it’s really good.

Thursday I spoke at the configuration management summit at USENIX (held at the Sheraton, where Summit was 2 years ago) — along with Mark Burgess from cfengine, Aaron Peterson from chef/opscode, and Narayan Desai from bcfg2 and Argonne National Labs. We did regular talks and also the panel thing, which was a bit like I imagine testifying before Congress must be like. No, Mr. Senator, I do not use OS/2! During the afternoon Barcamp sections I also presented on some other systems management tool projects I’ve worked on in the past, which I hope was useful to folks as they fill in the other gaps of their systems management tool suites. It was hot getting back to South Boston — no AC in the T stations — but the underground electric bus tunnels were pretty awesome. Moral of the story though — if you are holding a conference, don’t have it at the same time as vendor conference and an O’Reilly conference devoted to the same subject. 60 or so people came, but there could have easily been a lot more.

Incidentally I’m going to be leaving Puppet Labs after this week, for a new position that I’m very excited about (more details to be announced later). As this signals my exit from open source software and systems management software, I intend to do something heretical that I’ve been unable to do for some time. Maybe I’ll buy an XBox or install Windows 7. Maybe I’ll put a hat on a penguin. Anyway, I’m looking forward to it a ton.