My Experience of Linux Foundation Open Source Summit 2018
I came to Edinburgh, the UK on a whim to attend at Open Source Summit 2018 after I received the scholarship which was a complimentary pass to all events at the conference and travel fund too from Linux Foundation. Since I had to give up my plans in Tokyo, Japan to go, I set some goals and plans to make this trip worthwhile. My goals and plans were:
- Meet peers and potential clients or employers
- Plan the sessions
- Learn new things
- Have fun
The Linux Foundation events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.
Basically, it’s a big international conference with 2,000+ developers, sysadmins, DevOps professionals, architects, and community leadership professionals. It has an impressive line-up of speakers including Zak Hassan, Jim Zemlin, etc.
It started off with the Sightseeing Bus Tour of Edinburgh followed by the First-time attendee breakfast to help make the experience a little easier for them. I met other newcomers, as well as Open Source Summit veterans and pick up invaluable tips and tricks on how to best navigate the event.
There were talks on the community aspect of open source woven throughout the main three days of the summit.
The keynotes were really interesting. I attended both technical talks and talks focused on community and diversity in open source. Most of the technical talks needed some prerequisite knowledge which I lacked and were centered around sysadmins and developers. Although I learned a ton throughout the conference and overall experience to be highly beneficial for my work as a developer and designer.
On the first day, I also attended a Women in Open Source lunch, which was a pleasant way to be welcomed and also to network with so many open source geeks. I could see more female speakers and female attendees, perhaps because of the Women Diversity preference, I was happy to see that and hope the numbers keep increasing.
The reception at the National Museum of Scotland was one of the best. The choice of the venue couldn’t have been better, a night filled with great food and drinks, networking and entertainment.
I had a great time at the sponsor's showcase too. Found out about a lot of cool technologies that these tech companies are using. I participated in a couple of jackpots and was super surprised to get them all. I also got a lot of swag, goodies(best one was the Drone from IBM Developer group) from the booths.
A few cool companies/startups I met at the conference:
ARM — Provides proved IP and the industry’s most robust SoC development resources.
Codethink — Provide critical technology services and solutions for international corporates, finance, medical, telecoms, aerospace and automotive.
Sumologic — Machine data analytics service for log management and time-series metrics.
Criteol Labs — The team focuses on machine learning research in the field of computational advertising.
And at the end of the conference even though I didn’t get much from the technical sessions, but at least I now know what I should be learning and the next time I come for a conference like this I’ll benefit more from the technical sessions.
To summarize, I’m glad to have the chance to attend Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit, it was an incredible experience. It broadened my perspective about tech and pointed to the direction I should be going and also made me understand that there is a lot I still need to learn. It was a wonderful time to meet like-minded people, learned an enormous amount, make new friends and connections. I also had fun and learned new things. I would love to attend the summit next year too.
