To The Point Of Collapse

Post Debconf Spewage
I've been back from Edinburgh for a few days, but this is the first real chance I've had to sit down and write a little bit about it. I'll preface this blog post by saying that my first Debconf was probably the best single week of my entire life. Yeah, it was that awesome.

I won't talk about all the stuff that happened, because that would just take too long. The most important thing was that I got to see a number of old friends again and spend more time with them in one run than ever before. That alone was really enormous for me. On top of that was the pleasure of finally meeting so many people in person. I met a few XSF members finally, including Julien Cristau, my partner in crime. There's no way I could possibly list everyone that I'm so thankful to have finally met. There was one very memorable evening in the night venue where it was largely the same crowd who's usually in #debian-devel when I'm on, and we all just couldn't stop cracking jokes and laughing (not to mention ITP'ing absurd programs). There was another night when Old World Cambridge collided with New World Cambridge, and much Pimm's was had by (almost) all. There was staying up until 5 in the morning and stumbling back to the hostel in the dawn to try and get some sleep before running back to the conference. The most delightful thing about all this was that so many people I already knew and loved were there, and everyone who I hadn't met in person before turned out to be even better in real life. It was like a week of the purest joy.

I also got the privilege of giving my talk and BoF to fairly full audiences, particularly the former. The BoF was on maintaining packages with git. I didn't expect more than 10 people to show, but more than 5 times that did express interest, so many that they moved it to the main lecture hall instead of the small discussion room that it was going to be in originally. I hadn't really planned out how to handle an audience like that, and while I managed to get other people in the audience talking (thanks in particular to Madduck, MadCoder, and keithp for adding so much to the discussion) I felt like I had to fumble through a lot of it. That's the nature of a BoF I guess. I also gave a talk on my plans for the XSF for the Lenny release. I'll talk about that stuff in future blog posts (some of which are overdue) but I will say that it was surprisingly well attended given that it was scheduled for 9:45 am after one of the usual nights of drinking and hacking until dawn.

I have to echo others and give a big thank you to the organizers. You guys did a great job, and persevered in the face of adversity (read: cowgate) and really made a great conference out of it. I learned a lot, laughed even more, and drank even more than that and I can't wait to do it again.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Kittens - Underworld

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