Everytime somebody asks me about Scale I can only think of the same: Scale is the most important community lead conference in North America and it only gets better by the years. This year it celebrated its seventeenth edition and it just struck me: with me being there this year, there have been more Scales I have attended than I have not. This is my nineth conference out of 17.
The first time that I attended it was 2011, it was the edition followed by FudCon Tempe 2010 which happened to be my first Fedora conference and it was also the first time I got to meet some contributors that I had previously collaborated with, many of which I still consider my brothers.
As for this time, I almost didn’t make it as my visa renewal was resolved on Friday’s noon, one day after the conference started. I recovered it that same day and book a flight in the night. I couldn’t find anything to LAX -as I regularly fly- so I had to fly to Tijuana and from there I borrowed a cart to Pasadena. Long story short: I arrived around 1:30 AM on Saturday.
That is water under the bridge, a few hours later I was prepared to start the activities for the day. I met my good Fedora friends Scott Williams, Brian Monroe, Perry Rivera and -making his first Scale conference- Ivan Chavero who is with Red Hat and has been very active promoting Fedora in my hometown, he’s not an ambassador but he has helped me a lot in all of the Fedora activities that we have in Chihuahua.
That day started up with the keynote by Hashicorp’s Mitchell Hashimoto speaking on the transformation of the company starting from a Dorm Room OSS project.
From there, it was all booth duty for the remain of the conference.
Perry Rivera was assisting Clint Savage with the install fest happening in a separated building, so for most of that day it was only Brian, Scott and me in booth duty. Saturday is always the most active day in the expo floor, and this year it was not an exception. We had visitors continually and many Fedora users and enthusiasts approaching to us just to talk about how their Fedora experiences or with specific questions we were glad to clarify. At the booth we had a sign up list and a card board in which users could write How they do Fedora, it was fun and gratifying looking at those answers.
I think this year we got an excellent location within the exposition floor that allowed a lot of traffic coming through our booth. (See below)
It is always pleasant to say hello to our good friends and members of other communities. We could say hi to Jason Hibbets and Rikki Endsley from OpenSource.com and Jennifer Madriaga, Brian Proffit and Karsten Wade from Red Hat among others.
When expo floor closed, we still had a chance to attend a few talks, like Ivan Chavero’s «A Linux Engineer in Shark Tank» and also the Kubernetes BoF and the UpScale talks, always very fresh and informative. We closed that day with the traditional Game Night where we had the chance to have a good time and continue networking with the conference attendees.
As for Sunday, March 10th, the Daylight savings started so the day «felt» a little weird. The exhibit hall opened at 10:00AM and we noticed a smaller attendance, this again is normal for the last day. The floor was open for only 4 hours on Sunday. This time it was Brian who helped on the Install Fest so for then it was only Perry and myself working on the booth. Still people approaching to us and it is always satisfactory when students show interest if Fedora. This year I could also notice an increase on the spanish speaking attendees, which is also formidable to help promote Fedora among them.
I leave you with a few pictures that I manage to take, but -as usual- they cannot get to describe the experience.
Would I make to Scale18th? Only God $DEITY knows
Do I want to attend it? You can bet anything that I do 🙂
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