The Third Day

On Day Three, Shuttleworth gave another UbuCon keynote, where he talked about how open source can survive and thrive in the age of app stores. Since I had already spoken to him at length, I skipped the keynote and spent my time visiting booths and conducting interviews. I met with Christer Edwards – Senior System Administrator at Adobe – who told me how Adobe's Marketing division (not the Creative Cloud unit) is running on Linux and open source technologies, heavily using projects like Salt. Then I met Brendan Gregg – Performance Architect at Netflix – who talked about their use of AWS, Linux, and BSD. John Billings from Yelp gave a detailed overview of how Yelp basically runs on Linux and open source technologies.

The Fourth Day

The highlight of Day Four was a much-awaited keynote from open source developer Sarah Sharp. She gave an impressive talk about increasing diversity in the open source world. She shared her own story of how her dad got her interested in computers, how her husband assisted her as a friend, how other men, such as Andrew Greenberg and Bart Massey, introduced her to the open source world, and how her first talk landed her a job at Intel. The point she wanted to drive home was that everyone of us can play a role in increasing diversity in the open source world.

By the end of the day, I had mixed feelings. Thanks to the popularity of SCaLE and co-hosting of UbuCon, I got to meet the entire Ubuntu team for the first time. I got to meet some people I admire, including Sarah Sharp, Stormy Peters, and Cory Doctorow. I reconnected with friends and associates like Bryan Lunduke, Jono Bacon, Nithya Ruff, Mark Shuttleworth, and many others.

But, when I saw sponsors taking down their booths and wrapping up the event, I was a bit sad; I was going to miss SCaLE. The good news is that I will be back next year for SCaLE 15x.