Hey everyone!
This last Friday and Saturday, I went to a Linux convention called SCaLE 21x. I heard about SCaLE last year in August, and since it runs every March I was not able to go then. This year, with my second daughter coming soon, I decided to make it a priority to go (with approval from my wife).
Friday, I mostly went to presentations as that was DevOps Day LA, and I have a great interest in DevOps technologies. It was nice getting to meet all the people there at currently working or aspire to work in the DevOps space (I would count System Admins, Cloud Admins, SREs, ect as in the ‘DevOps space’).
Even on this first day, I could tell that this was very much a grassroots convention ran be people who are excited about Linux and FOSS technologies. For example, one of the presentations I went to was Terrible Ideas in Kubernetes by Corey Quinn, who writes the Last Week in AWS newsletter. This was more of a comedy routine making fun of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and of course Kubernetes, so not your typical ‘corporate’ convention fare. Everyone I met was very friendly and willing to talk to me just about any topic.
On Saturday, I did go to a few presentations, including one called Where Does the Linux Desktop Go From Here? that was about trying to get people to help contribute in different ways and making sure don’t burn out those same contributors.
I also spent a good amount of time in the Exhibition Hall, which yes, did have companies like MySql DataDog, ect trying to get people to purchase licenses for their products (although not so much at the event itself), as well as a few that were there to recruit such as AWS, Microsoft, and Meta. However, there were also some cool community groups that had booths in the Exhibit hall, such as KDE, GNOME, Alma Linux, Gentoo, Fedora and the Free Software Foundation. These community groups were may favorite, and in particular my two favorites were SoCalSUSE and LinuxChixLA.
LinuxChixLA in particular interested me because as I currently have one daughter and will have a second one shortly, I think this group will be of great use to me in the future as I hope to introduce my daughters to Linux and tech at a relatively young age. SoCalSUSE were just very friendly and continue to be friendly to me after the convention. I have tried OpenSUSE in a VM, and soon I will be installing it properly on my computer. Once I have gotten a good grasp on it, I may write it up here.
Anyway, that was a lot of words to say, if you have a Linux convention near you, I really think you should go! It was an awesome experience to meet so many people that are passionate about FOSS and Linux, and I hope to go for many years!