After a bit more than 24 hours back East following my abbreviated (and ultimately unsuccessful but very fun) Denver junket, I’m about to head back to Boston to turn right around and hop a flight out West. This time I’m overshooting Denver and continuing on to Portland, OR for O’Reilly’s annual Open Source Conference (OSCON). Next to Mashup Camp, this is probably my favorite of the conferences I attend, if only because I can get away with jeans, my Sox hat and flip-flops.
Besides the dress code, however, this is the far and away the best conference for getting together with anyone and everyone involved in open source – be they commercial or non-commercial. Which brings me to scheduling. My high level agenda is this:
- Mon (PM): Depart Boston for Portland (staying @ The Jupiter)
- Tues: O’Reilly Radar (thanks to Nat for the kind invite)
Meal availability: Dinner is booked, lunch is open - Wed: No fixed session plans
Meal availability: Breakfast and lunch are booked, dinner is open - Thurs: Giving two talks. First, I follow (as best I’m able) two of the smarter gents at the show in Sun’s Simon Phipps and Root’s r0ml with a 15 minute keynote entitled: “Developers: You’ve Got the Power – Now What?“, and then at 1:45 PM one of my favorite people Dave Rosenberg and I will be reprising our OSBC panel on Marketing to Dilbert. Modesty prevents me from arguing that you should attend these for the sake of the content, so I’ll appeal to your sense of pity instead 😉
Meal availability: Open, as far as I’m aware - Thurs (PM): Red eye back to Boston. And while I can’t make it, let me give our friends from Virtuas a plug and suggest that you make plans to attend their Thursday night event. Matt, Matt and the gang know how to have a party, and last year’s version featured a fairly animated discussion on open source Java so who knows what you’ll hear this year.
I’d love to throw a highly informal meetup during the show, wherein RedMonk will buy a round on Wednesday evening for any Friends of RedMonk, Friends of Friends of RedMonk or just folks that like beer and open source, but I realize that I’m competing with a competitive party circuit so that may or may not fly. I’ll try and organize this better next time around, but if you’ll a.) be in the Portland area, b.) like beer, and c.) need some warmup for later evening festivities drop me a line and we’ll see what we can organize. My plan this year is to not get on the wrong train and end up a mile away from my hotel. As I said at the time last year, any walk that begins with “it can’t be that far” is not likely to turn out well.
The only wildcard in the above travel schedule is the Az monster. I’ve haven’t secured someone to watch her while I’m gone just yet, so there’s a remote possibility that I’ll postpone my flight until Tuesday night, but either way I’ll be there for Wed/Thurs.
Who am I looking forward to seeing while I’m there? Lots of folks. Here are a couple of the attendees, in no particular order, that I’m either scheduled to speak with or will be actively stalking, and I’ll disclose the customers as I go. Sun’s new open source team including Berkus, Bray, Dornsife, Marble, Phipps etc (customers), Optaros’ Stephe Walli, Oracle’s Mike Olson (customer), Gentoo’s Donnie Berkholz, the Covalent gang, Virtuas’ Matt Raible & Matt Filios, Ubuntu’s Jeff Waugh, Root’s r0ml, IBM’s Bob Sutor (customer), the gang from Scalix (our newest customer), Greenplum’s Scott Yara (customer), Alfresco’s Matt Asay, The Post’s Adrian Holovaty, OO.o’s Louis Suarez-Potts, Intel’s Danese Cooper, Jabber’s Peter Saint-Andre, Eclipse’s Ian Skerrett and Mike Milinkovich (customer), and, well, you probably get the idea. But just as I’ll probably only get to talk to a fraction of the people on this list, I highly encourage any of you that’ll be there to look me up (I’ll be the one running around in a Red Sox hat). If you’re not on the above list, that’s my loss. Let’s fix that.
I’ve heard the weather up in the Northwest is brutally hot, but while I’m not excited at that prospect, I’m just hoping it’s not as dry as Colorado. Three short days back in Denver destroyed my feet, and I’m walking around with terribly dry and cracked heels. Fortunately, this show is one of the few that’s worth hobbling to.
See you all in a few days. For RedMonk business while I’m out, I’d suggest chatting with either of my esteemed colleagues.
Update: Forgot to mention the folks from one of our favorite clients, Eclipse.
