I just had an experience that reminds me why I find physically going to open source conferences valuable and rewarding.
I am here at the last day of Linux.conf.au 2013 in Canberra. Earlier today, Tim Berners-Lee delivered his keynote. Afterwards, we all moved over to the main public hall for afternoon tea.
I happened to overhear a trio of young university students talking about the huge presence of the OpenStack project at this LCA, and expressing some misconceptions about the project. Two of them had never even heard of OpenStack before seeing it presented here at the conference.
As one may do in the "hallway track" of conferences like this, I jumped in, and introduced myself, and gave them a better overview of what OpenStack is and what it tries to do, while handing out business cards
"You mean with this OpenStack, I can run my own cloud?"
"Yes. You do have to supply the hardware."
"Well, our department is throwing out heaps of old PCs. We could gather them up, haul them down to our student computer club, and install it on them..."
I encouraged this line of thought, and pointed out that having ops experience and dev experience with OpenStack is right now really good for getting a job.
THAT got their attention.
"I could get a job with HP if I do this?"
"You could get a job at lots of places. Lots of companies are getting into OpenStack, and they are hiring."
When I left them for the next talk, they were talking about getting in touch with all the other Australian university computer student clubs, each club installing OpenStack on recovered junked PCs, and joining them all together as availability zones.
I like to hope I've instigated something fun here. Or at least made some people's lives more interesting.
I am here at the last day of Linux.conf.au 2013 in Canberra. Earlier today, Tim Berners-Lee delivered his keynote. Afterwards, we all moved over to the main public hall for afternoon tea.
I happened to overhear a trio of young university students talking about the huge presence of the OpenStack project at this LCA, and expressing some misconceptions about the project. Two of them had never even heard of OpenStack before seeing it presented here at the conference.
As one may do in the "hallway track" of conferences like this, I jumped in, and introduced myself, and gave them a better overview of what OpenStack is and what it tries to do, while handing out business cards
"You mean with this OpenStack, I can run my own cloud?"
"Yes. You do have to supply the hardware."
"Well, our department is throwing out heaps of old PCs. We could gather them up, haul them down to our student computer club, and install it on them..."
I encouraged this line of thought, and pointed out that having ops experience and dev experience with OpenStack is right now really good for getting a job.
THAT got their attention.
"I could get a job with HP if I do this?"
"You could get a job at lots of places. Lots of companies are getting into OpenStack, and they are hiring."
When I left them for the next talk, they were talking about getting in touch with all the other Australian university computer student clubs, each club installing OpenStack on recovered junked PCs, and joining them all together as availability zones.
I like to hope I've instigated something fun here. Or at least made some people's lives more interesting.
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