This year’s Southeast Linuxfest was another great event. Came back with many photos that will probably take me a while to get around to going through before I can post them.
Crowds seemed a little bit smaller this year, but we had the whole hotel meeting space this year which spread the crowd out a fair bit so that probably altered my perception of this year’s crowd size.
Although I spent most of my time going around taking photos, I did manage to sit in on a few interesting talks. SELF network guy Zack Underwood gave a good talk on his adventure in building a tiny house. The “Go Forth And Brown Bag” session by Sarah Ofsdahl (one of the last talks of SELF) was another good one with some good tips for what to put into training sessions and how to do them. Steve Owens’ “Getting Kids Involved In Computing” talk was also a good one too, highlighting a number of kid-friendly resources to help kids learn how to program.
Fiber track was pretty popular again this year, and they also sponsored a movie night where Plan 9 From Outer Space with the Rifftrax commentary was shown. I missed the movie because I was busy with the amateur radio testing session and GPG key signing party.
SELF amateur radio boosted its presence a bit this year with a special event station, W4L (Whiskey 4 Linux) that ran during the day for most of the weekend. The hotel gave the group permission to set up an antenna on the roof of the conference center, so a 30′ mast with a G5RV dipole was put up. Not sure how many contacts they ended up making, but sounded like they were doing reasonably well.
There was also the usual amateur radio license test session held at SELF this year, with 20 people taking the test. Not sure of the exact numbers, but most of them left with either a new license or upgrade. One person with an expired Technician class license came to the test and left with a General class license.
This year’s SELF keynote was given by Eric S Raymond (who I only recently learned is a somewhat controversial figure) which was given remotely due to recent medical issues. ESR talked about the “Load Bearing Internet People” (LBIP) problem, those people who are developing/maintaining critical pieces of software that keep what we know as “The Internet” running, but receive little to no support for doing so. Although there were a few problems with the remote presentation (video froze up, but audio still came through), I thought it was a pretty good talk he gave. Regardless of how you feel about ESR, it’s an important issue that he brought up.
The SELF Craft Beer Exchange happened again this year. Got to sample some pretty tasty beers. There was A LOT OF BEER, but not enough people drinking it this year because after Friday’s party it looked like barely a dent had been made in what was brought. Even after Saturday’s party, it looked like hardly any was gone.
I ended up leaving with almost twice as much beer as I brought to share.
I ended up grabbing a few more beers after I tweeted this, just because there was still so much left over.
This year, the #SELF2019 hash tag collision on Twitter turned out to be especially entertaining with Southeast Leatherfest happening the same weekend. Both events usually happen about the same time each year.
The call for presenters for SELF 2020 is already open. Go submit something!
