Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - conferences

Breaking the Silence.

Kris Buytaert — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 06:51:35 +0000

3+ months is probably the biggest timeout I've taken from blogging in a while..
Not that I didn't have anything to write ..but more that I was prioritizing writing different content over
over writing blogposts.

Blogging tech snippets and contributing documentation used to be one now all of that has evolved.
Anyhow ..

So to get things going here's my preliminary Conference schedule for the next couple of months.

First up, in about one week (august 20-24) I`ll be chairing the #devops track at DrupalCon Munich
Next to talking there myselve explaining the Drupal Crowd what devops is
Plenty of interresting content there ranging from culture over to tooling and back. I`m really looking forward to this one.
There's also talk of the local Devops meetup group hosting an additional meetup !
About a month later I`ll be heading to San Francisco for a talk at PuppetConf 2012. I'll probably be around in the valley a bit earlier
so if you anyone wants to meet up I`m open for suggestions.
I've taken over a bit of Patricks workload this year , thus I`m trying to guide the local crew in Rome into organising yet another awesome Devopsdays Europe,
If you haven't noticed yet , Devopsdays is going to be in Rome this year on october 5 and 6. Both registration and the call for participation are still open !

Next up .. content ... on how monitoring tools still suck .. and I`m still not sure wether a certification program is relevant for open source consultants ..

Fall , Winter and Spring Conference Season 2011 - 2012

Kris Buytaert — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 12:53:29 +0000

Patrick posted his upcoming conference schedule for the next couple of months.
as you can see there are a comple of overlapping conferences :)

Conferences I'm speaking at or likely to attend are:

The first week of October I`ll be in the Valley , I`ll be late for Jenkinsconf but I hope to pick up some events while I`m there.. suggestions are welcome , I`m also heading back to Europe earlier than planned so I will miss BadCamp :( ...
Devopsdays Goteborg, Sweden : October 14,15 - The yearly Europe devops event is happening in Goteborg this time. It's going to be really exciting this time , as the theme is inclusive. Eploring the boundaries of devops, I`m once again in the organization of this conference.
T-Dose 2011, The Technical Dutch Open Source Event, on 5 and 6 november 2011 , I will be talking again about my experiences with complex Puppet setups
~~Citconf , London: November 11-12 - All you ever wanted to know about Continuous Integration. Period, registered, haven't booked flights yet.~~
Cloudcamp Belgium: November 21 - I'm looking forward to this year's event, as there will likely more practioners and less marketing folks.
Lisa 2011, Boston, US, I`m giving an Invited talk titled , Devops: The past and futre are here, It's just not evenly distributed (yet), and I`ll be on a panel titled What Will Be HOt Next Year, really looking forward to this one :)
Fosdem.org will take place on 4 and 5 February 2012 , and as every year since it inception I'll be there
The UKUUG rebranded to FlossUK , they are hosting their Annual Spring conference from 20th to 22nd March in Edinburgh , given their refound focus it will be even more interresting !
And as announced earlier this week Loadays.org will take place in Antwerp again this year on 31/3/2012 and 1/4/2012 , as the previous years I`m co organizing this conference

And yes, I do work from time to time. Just that these conferences are a great way to capture and share new ideas. All worth it!

On Conferences

Kris Buytaert — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:52:30 +0000

Somehow this year my schedule really isn't going to get filled with conferences,unlike my 13 speaking engagements last year this year I decided to go for a lot less :)

Froscon together with OpenSQLCamp is convienently scheduled during an already long planned family weekend .. but I really hope to go there nex year

I've been wanting to go south for conferences for ages, Spain, France, Portugal, Italy , Greece are all places I'd love to go and see how the different Open Sourcen conferences play out there. This summer there actually were some different conferences tha took place in Spain, Gran Canaria etc . but I coouldn't make it there for the obvious reasons..

The October conference schedule has another but similar problem , apart from T-Dose which I plan on going to again, I`m doomed to miss LinuxKongress 2009 and the Open Source monitoring conference as they both collide with DevOpsDays

LinuxKongress was initially scheduled for late september which meant it was on my planning but as they rescheduled because of a conflict with the Linux Plumbers Conference at the other side of the ocean , it means that for the 2nd year in row I`ll miss LinuxKongress (last year was on purpose as I had already been to OLS) ,

So I`m on the lookout for some new and exiting conferences to go to :)

There was an OpenSourceWorldConference in Malaga last couple of years , but their site hasn't been updated anymore for 2009 .. anyone knows what's going on there ?

Open Conference Organizing

Kris Buytaert — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:23:30 +0000

There are a lot of great Open Source conferences out there, some of them organized by volunteers, some of them oranized by user groups, some by commecial entities, but none of them is so open as the last DrupalCon,

In all its awesomeness the DrupalCon DC organization actually
published it's internal financial details for everybody to view.

Try beating that :)

Oh and while we are talking about conferences .. Fosdem has a YouTube channel with a lot of recorded fosdem talks available.

Conference Time

Kris Buytaert — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:22:52 +0000

Grab your calendars and mark the following dates :

T-Dose 2009 will be held on 3 and 4 october in Eindhoven again.
Last year we had a nice Drupal track, some great MySQL talks and , a great unplanned Cloud talk , and different other interesting talks, so this year promises also to be very interesting.
(PS. Drupal Themers.. you might want to propose a new theme for the T-Dose site, who knows you'll even win something)
For the first time , 2009 will be the year that Belgium will have it's own Security Conference, BruCon has just announced Christofer Hoff as a KeyNote speaker , BruCon will take place on 18 and 19 september... obviously in Brussels ;)
While we mention VirtSec I obviously should plug my own upcoming VirtSec talk at the LSec Secure Virtualization seminar on next Friday 13th

Monitoring MySQL

Kris Buytaert — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 14:16:57 +0000

The slides for my Monitoring MySQL talk , which I gave earlier today in an overcrowded MySQl Developersroom at Fosdem are now online, both at my site and at Slideshare

As of now I actually expect people to use those slides for schoolwork or next year in a main Fosdem track :)
As afterall that is the goal of Open Source and spreading the word ..

MySQL Monitoring Shoot Out

View more presentations from Kris Buytaert. (tags: mysql monitor)

Open Source Days 2008 , Day 2

Kris Buytaert — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:52:53 +0000

As I was already up since yesterday 0500 , it was dinner with Sven , Robin and some other conference visitors at a Turkish Buffet place , after which we headed to what seemed to be a great bar where they failed to serve us while waiting for over 10 minutes, so we moved on to another place. and then to be "early"

After walking around a bit in Copenhagen and looking for a bus stop to go to the university I managed to bump into Wim & Co who offered me a ride to the IT University. Where I was almost in time for the first talk by
Jan Wieck about Slony-I, A master to multiple slaves-replication system for PostgreSQL
Given my recent MySQL MultiMaster setups I was fairly interested where PostgreSQL is at today.

Jan started out with explaining where he used replication the most,
For backups and Specialized services so he could offload long running and intrusive reporting tools to an isiolated server.

While going over the history of Slony he also mentioned eRserver, first written in Perl later rewritten in Java and that was a ... Well lets just say that memory usage wasn't really ideal.

The presentation covered different potential replication scenarios and the problems one could run into.
No sign however of multimaster replication. Jan Wieck even told us he had no plans to implmenent multimaster replication
at all at the moment. To me MultiMaster means that I can move my database connection together with my application service in a HA setup. I don't need to wory about the possibility of writing in a slave and breaking replication as the slave is also a master and the other node Will catch up.

Next up was a talk about openID, which made me realize a couple of things about it.. all off that in a separate post :)

The University restaurant was open and you could pay for your Chilli Con Carne to a really Grumpy cashier which brings me right to the next talk I followed.. A Developers Guide to Grumpy Old Sysadmins however, the majority of people in the room were Sysadmins , or people with a mixed role doing both development and sysadmin work.

You don't let your developers even close to your production systems. He then went on to read a fairly big part of "Over Clocked, Stories of the Future Present " by Cory Doctorow , which I've promptly put on my holliday reading list :

So what's it like being a sysadmin ? You get calls in the middle of the night because a system breaks,
When you work you .. people complain when things go wrong.. they don't cheer when things go right or when you have done your job correctly

Reminds me of this situation at a customer where the Cisco people that fail to automate their work and get to travel around the qworld to do their work using their serial console , where as the Linux platform team has automated their work so far they get to stay home and watch the machines boot then do a quick check over ssh to see if they actually work.

Anyhow.. the talk really wasn't focusing on how developers could cooperate better with sysadmins, apart from a couple of general tips so it really missed its goal.

I popped into the Lightning talk about Ubuntu on EEE talk , hoping to learn something, apart from 1 url that I should read I guess it was the otherway around , it's usually a bad sign when a speaker starts every 2 slides with "I haven't tested this myselve but " ...

Open Source Virtualization

Kris Buytaert — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:18:26 +0000

I've just placed the presentation I gave both yesterday at the Open Source Days in Copenhagen , and last week in Zurich at the Open Expo , about Open Source Virtualization online.
The presentation is based on a series of articles I wrote earlier this year for Virtualization.com

You can download it here

The presentation covers a fairly complete overview of what's around in Open Source Virtualization tools and and their Management frameworks.

I will be giving the same presentation again at the end of the month at T-Dose in Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Upcoming talks

Kris Buytaert — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:18:51 +0000

Over at OReilly GMT I listed lots of upcoming European conferences .. lots of interresting ones but I can't go to all of them .. well not till someone starts paying me for that ;)

So I won't go to Drupalcon , and Tom will be presenting at the Nagios Conference

I will however be talking about Open Source Virtualization at OpenExpo in Zurich , and one week later at OpenDays in Copenhagen. The talk will be based on my series of Articles on the History and Future of Open Source virtualization earlier this year at Virtualization.com

Given that those 2 conferences are week after week and LinuxKongress Hamburg being exactly a week later , this year will be the first since many that I'll have to miss LinuxKongress. I had a topic in mind, but time just didn't allow me.

T-Dose is also on my list and there is some talk about an upcoming CloudCamp in Berlin , but no final plans there yet.

Upcoming conferences

Kris Buytaert — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:10:55 +0000

My Conference schedule is growing again. In about 2 weeks I`ll be in Ottawa at the Ottawa Linux Symposium.

I`ll be giving 2 talks there, the first at the Virtualization Miniconference where I`ll be discussing the new openQRM 4 and it's new Drupal style plugin management.

And my second talk will be together with my collegue Tom and we'll be talking about Systems Monitoring We'll be looking at how you can keep an eye on your infrastructure with open source tools

So after 2 talks at the LinuxKonference in Germany a trip to Linux.conf.au I`ll finally be visiting OLS :) I've looked a the OLS schedule and it obviously looks very interesting.

In september I`ll be talking about the Open Source Virtualization landscape at Open Expo Switzerland in Zurich .

If you run into me don't hesitate to chat .. always interrested in meeting new people.