Sunday 27th January
LCA started on Sunday, where I got to go to the airport and hang around for a few hours running around to meet speakers/delegates and collect them up to put on our hired bus. Registration opened sometime in the afternoon, but being at the airport until 7pm meant I missed it.
Monday 28th January
First day of the conference. Spent in Portsea (2 hours away from the conference venue) scuba diving with our special guest Linus. Lost Linus at the start of the first boat dive and was very grateful to see him on the boat when we re-boarded at the end. Thought the dive master we had with us could have been better on that dive. Second boat dive was much smoother and we all managed to stay together and have a great time.
Tuesday 29th January
Gave my "Not common enough code optimisations" talk at the Linuxchix mini-conf. Discovered that I had a lot less time than I was hoping to have, so I had to speed up the talk dramatically, but it seemed to be well received all the same.
Went to a great talk by Stormy Peters about community managers. It made me think about my contributions to Open Source. I don't actually contribute code to any projects. I could, but I don't because I fill up my time with community tasks. I'm active in all of the Australia Perl Mongers groups, and hang out on the Wellington Perl Mongers list too. Where I can I organise meetings for them, especially if one of us will be in town to give a talk. I'm subscribed to almost all of the Linux Users Groups in Australia as well as several women in IT based lists. I've helped run OSDC every year since it started in 2004. I'm responsible for LCA's Open Day this year (Saturday 2nd February - come along if you're in Melbourne!), and have been doing various other volunteer things to help too. I'm also Treasurer of SAGE-AU (the Australian System Administration industry body), and am helping organise their conference for August this year.
Doing this hard behind-the-scenes work proves to be quite rewarding in its own way. I turn up at conferences, and everyone seems to know my name. I suspect that if I gave my free time to coding on an Open Source project, then a lot less people would know my name - unless I was lucky enough to pick the "next big thing" project...
I never really intended to be famous; but I'm certainly not complaining.
Wednesday 30th January
This morning's keynote was by Bruce Schneier. A very interesting talk, presented extremely well. The best talk I've ever seen given without any visual assistance. Compelling enough that the right hand side of my brain didn't even notice the time passing.
Huge number of OLPC XOs are being given out, but it looks like I'm not going to be one of the lucky recipients. The focus is to encourage more people to develop more things for them, so it's reasonable I'm not getting one, seeing as how I don't program in Python much and I don't have the time to write much code right now.
I'm really looking forward to reducing my volunteer load a little.
More on today to follow...
