[This post is late because I came down with the flu right after I got back from ApacheCon. I guess next year I will get a flu shot]
Talks
This year I was unable to attend all of the conference due to some scheduling problems, so I can’t give an in depth report on talks. I used some of the time that I might normally have spent in talks to catch up with people that I haven’t seen in a while. I was able to attend a good number of the talks in the Hadoop track. The track was larger than last year’s track (due in part to a larger room), but I felt that last year’s track was stronger. It might also be that I’ve become a bit more familiar with Hadoop, making it harder to make a bing impression. It’s definitely the case that there was a lot of interest in Hadoop, and I expect that to continue.
Unfortunately, I missed the NoSQL meetup during the Apache BarCamp. I think that there could/should have been an entire NoSQL track, especially given the fact that Cassandra and CouchDB are both frequently mentioned NoSQL technologies, and both are housed at Apache.
One talk that surprised me was Ross Gardler’s talk Teaching and Learning about Open Development, originally I didn’t think that I would have time to stay for that talk slot, but a rearrangement of my return flight loosened my schedule so that I could stick around. Ross is the chairman of the newly created Community Development PMC at Apache. This is a new effort aimed at improving the experience of contributors and new committers. Some of the people on the PMC have been heavily involved in the ASF’s Google Summer of Code outreach, and will be bringing their experiences over with them. It seems like this PMC will also be a good place for people concerned about diversity issues to dig in and help in a concrete fashion.
Celebration
This year’s ApacheCon’s have been a celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the founding of the Apache Software Foundation. At Oakland, there was a cake, a proclamation from the Mayor of Oakland, and (I didn’t get to see this) a letter of congratulations from the Governor of California. Rather than try and describe the festivities in prose, I’ll leave you with some photos:
The entire set of photos is up on Flickr.