As you can probably discern from my various postings here, my travel schedule is somewhat complicated. It’s light years better than the 5-day-a-week travel from my SI days, don’t get me wrong, but I’m constantly missing things here in Colorado that I’d like to attend. And if it’s not travel, it’s work. Just this week I missed Wednesday’s JUG because I was on a plane coming home from SFO.
But in a rare twist of fate, my calendar had last night open and so I was able to make it over to the inaugural Front Range Solaris Users Group meeting over on the Sun campus in Broomfield. It was better attended than I expected, even discounting the substantial portion of the audience that have a little Sun logo on their paychecks.
The first session, as such initial forays tend to be, served as an introduction to Solaris, with an emphasis on how ordinary folks can contribute back. The conversation was candid and honest about some of the challenges non-Sun employees face (i.e. the current lack of testing tools, etc), but provided constructive suggestions about how to bridge those gaps as the testing and other portions catch up to the already open sourced portions of the OS.
One interesting tidbit that I hadn’t been aware of, for all you prospective contributors, was the fact that the engineers have apparently gone through and tagged the code with “oss-bite-size” comments to provide newcomers with discrete entrypoints into a fairly massive pile of code. Great idea.
Anyway, will look forward to future FROSUGs (how about an iCal link?), and hopefully JUGs, LUGs, PUGs, and NUGs as well 😉
The few pics I took at the event are here.
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