Stickybit

Adventures in Copenhagen

Skrivet av Sean Finney den 2007-09-26 | 0 Kommentarer

Taggar: debian, free and open source software, eurobsdcon

a little more than a week ago, i was invited down by a friend of a friend to give a quick 15 minute talk in copenhagen about package management in debian. the talk was to be part of a larger "package management deathmatch" being hosted by the european BSD users' conference (euroBSDcon), where developers from different OS distributions would pitch why their system was the greatest thing since sliced bread and so much cooler than those other guys' system.

of course there was a catch or two, or three: the audience was fully authorized to give their feedback during the talks, be it via applause or heckling. the judges would ultimately decide the winner, based largely on the audience feedback, but they were not above (and in fact encouraged) bribery to help influence there decisions. and as i mentioned, the venue was a BSD users' conference. need i remind you that the attitudes that are held between "linux users" and "BSD users" range between friendly antagonism and outright enmity depending on the person/topic; so i was suspecting at best a really tough crowd and at worst a horrible, horrible trap.

fortunately it was mostly the former. the crowd was pretty tough, but thanks to a combination of a good talk, some healthy pandering to the audience, and a tasty fresh-baked kladkaka for the judges i managed to escape mostly unscathed. i had the good luck of going second-to-last, so i was able to watch and learn from my predecessors. the poor gentoo devs (the only other gnu/linux folk at the conference) didn't have this luck, and went second. i think it's only fair to admit that they ended up taking a lot of what could have otherwise been aimed at me, so thanks, guys :)

surprisingly, i ended up winning the talk by a slim margin, largely thanks to annika's recipe, no doubt. and to the victor, the spoils: a box of delicious handmade danish chocolates. after the talk i was approached by a number of people who were in the crowd, who either wanted to congratulate me for the talk, to give me props for having the guts to even show up for the talk, or to privately admit to me that they ran debian too (sssshh)...

after the conference, i went to a brewpub (which is named, imaginatively, "brewpub") downtown with a bunch of the other conference folks (and met up with Clint, who was passing through on business). the rest of the evening i spent most of my focus on the "cole porter" and trying not to embarass myself with my rusty french in front of some french freeBSD devs, and went home happy and exhausted. the chocolates didn't last very long.

for those interested, the talk can be found here (openoffice impress format)