This post was initially intended to share thoughts about PyConES 2017, but it’s been an stressful events month. So it also contains experiences from the latest conferences I’ve attended/participated/talked: LibreCon, Open Source Summit Europe and Liferay Spain Symposium.
Let’s start the reviews…
PyConES 2017
I’ve been willing to attend to this conference for years. I consider myself a Python newbie and it’s, by far, my favorite programming language. I’ve been self-learning it since 2000.
This year, Bitergia was one of the sponsors and my colleague Daniel had one talk accepted. You can see his talk online:
Beyond the incredible experience of visiting Cáceres, this was my first time ever in Extremadura!
I would like to congratulate the organization team for such a great conference. The venue was awesome. How many times have you seen tech talks in a church or a monastery?
As an attendee, I think that a tech conference is worthy if I come back home willing to try things I’ve seen in the talks. And there are a couple of things I’ve been playing with since PyConES: Python threads, Django CMS and Click… So, thank you very much Python Spain and the rest of the organization team!
As side note, it’s been a pleasure meeting FreeWear crew. Bitergia and GrimoireLab t-shirts are coming!! You should take them into consideration if you are in the opensource business.
LibreCon 2017
And the crazy 3 conferences in 6 days tour started with the LibreCon 2017, hosted by AGASOL.
I had a talk accepted about how companies should adapt their IT development processes to face Digital Transformation. The presentation covered some ideas about inner source development, analyzing community driven development processes and the Autodesk experience. Slides are available online:
Some of the best experiences from this conference were to see Obijuan live in action (I want to learn more about FPGAWars!), meeting Alejandro López, Slimbook‘s CEO and the inspirational talks with Miguel Anxo from GalPon.
The venue was great and I have a dedicated Flickr album. Perhaps, I am biased because my family roots are from Galicia, but what could we criticize about the speaker’s swag?
Open Source Summit Europe 2017
If Open Source Summit North America was great for Bitergia, attending to Open Source Summit Europe in Prague was some kind of challenge. Were we be able to keep the hype expectations high around CHAOSS community and GrimoireLab?
On Monday, I had my talk about how managers can use GQM to improve projects management, specially in open source and inner source communities:
On Tuesday, there was a break out session about CHAOSS, and I presented GrimoireLab:
I had to leave on Wednesday, but 2 days were enough to see Bitergia and GrimoireLab stuff mentioned in several talks and meetings. 3 years ago, we were almost unknown for most of the LinuxCon audience, so it’s great to see what we have been able to achieve as a company in such time. There was also time for listening from our community and customers, and there are several things to be improved in the services and features our product offers. But, that’s something for Bitergia’s blog.
We had a great time in Prague. It’s been great seeing my friends from OK Comunicacion there in action!
Liferay Symposium Spain 2017
And last but not least, I had the pleasure to join Liferay Spain Symposium.
I had used Liferay during my years in Andago, and they have lately fostered their community. So I submitted a proposal for a talk based on some analysis I ran about Liferay projects. The talk was accepted, but changed to a 7 minutes lightning talk. That’s tight to explain many things, specially if the title is something like “Measuring success in open source projects”. And to make things funnier, Liferay people has set up their own GrimoireLab dashboard using their new WeDeploy solution!
I tried my best with a small set of slides, focused in my own definition of success when I think about the open source projects I have participated in. If you contribute to a project and that sets a path for your daily job, and one day you get paid by that project, doesn’t it mean that the project has succeeded to be able to support its own contributors?
The symposium venue was great (check the photos), and the quality of some talks has been great! If you remember my definition of worthy conference, this was just one of those. I’ve been playing lately with Electric.js, but my lack of knowledge about Soy is driving me mad!
And, I have to say it: I loooove this video from Liferay, because I think most of us will agree with their reasons about why open source is so important for us:
So, what’s next?
Next posts will be shorter (I hope) and focused in GrimoireLab. They will work as follow up of Analyzing Open Source Development. Part 1.. Stay tuned!