Thursday came all too early. After a quick breakfast, it was time for the keynote:
Major Hayden talked about impostor syndrome and related difficulties (like the Dunning-Kruger effect). He suggested a method used by airplane pilots might help some people to move forward when they are affected by these sorts of things: The OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, and act. Interesting topic and many people seemed to know it in the room.
Next up was my talk on open source etiquette. It wasn’t completely horrible, but while giving it I saw a bunch of places I should change the pacing and what I wanted to mention and what pictures I might use. There wasn’t a big crowd, but there were at least a few people and one person did thank me after the talk so it can’t be completely bad. 😉
I went back to the hallway track until lunch (another nice one at the hotel).
Then on to Paul Frields talk about remote work. I’ve worked remotely for the last 15 years, so I think I do ok, but there were some nice ideas Paul had about how to prioritize things and simplify workflow. I may well try a few of the things he mentioned in the coming weeks.
Next was a talk by Mike Mcgrath on Atomic and Openshift and docker and how all the things fit together. It was pretty high level, but it did clarify for me some things about what things were used in others and how they all fit.
Then off to a talk from Ralph Bean about technical debt and microservices. Some good background for other people, and some ideas we should definitely try out in coming months. In particular I liked the idea of doing a week where we just try and do cleanup and fighting down tech debt every few months.
The last session of the day was the “meet your fesco” session. Sadly, we didn’t get all FESCo there, but we did have some good discussions and questions. There was talk about how to better handle secondary arches, how to better deal with security updates, how we should handle the old “Incomplete” changes that never got actually submitted anywhere, and what the role of FESCo vs the council was. Great stuff.
The evening event was then at the Strong museum of fun. It was awesome. There were a bunch of old video and arcade games. I had fun playing centipede and air hocky and hercules (The worlds largest pinball). The winner tho was a game called “Whirly Bird” which was this mechanical helicoper game from 1969, it was quite cool. The food, drink and company was great as well.
Tomorrow will start out at 9am with another keynote and then we will go into workshops. Looking forward to actually getting things done tomorrow instead of just talking about them. 🙂