Tuesday, November 01, 2011

How FSOSS was for me

Last week at FSOSS a lot of good things happened for me and writing about it in an organized manner will be a bit challenging :)

As I mentioned last week, I gave a new talk at FSOSS on Saturday morning. I spoke about what is involved on shipping open-source software to millions of users (I will add the presentation in another blog post). I had the opportunity to bring my sweet beloved Veronica with me and according to her "[my] presentation was wonderful! best looking guy there ... and [my] talk wasn't too bad either!... I learned so much (though your handsome face was quite distracting! :) )". A little biased but I got to say that it felt like it came about right and I had a lot of fun.
During Q&A for my presentation.

I had started working on this presentation on Tuesday and had the opportunity to run it through Mike Hoye who had encouraged me to give the talk a month ago. His input was valuable and helped me with some problems I was having.

Besides my presentation there were many things that happened on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

As soon as I got my bag of swags I realized that most sponsors (and not sponsors) were represented in it (see pic below). I was surprised that I did not see anything from us even though Mozilla was the biggest sponsor of the event.
Mike Hoye giving his presentation.
No Mozilla swag on the welcome bag.


Me, Jeff Griffiths and two Microsoft evangelists

I spent most of my day with Jeff Griffiths at the Mozilla booth. Over there, I realized what big of a brand Mozilla is and the affinity that Seneca students have with us. I was overwhelmed with how many came to us to find out how to contribute or how to take part of an internship.

I also noticed a couple of things while I was at the booth. I noticed there were a couple of non-open-source booths like Microsoft. I guess events like this need sponsors to give money regardless of how much open-source they do. Regardless of this, I went and spent some time with them as I was curious on the Microsoft phone (which felt much better than I had expected). I was really impressed that they had three people and all sorts of cool swags and phones all over. They also had a very cool shirt that says "I love Windows phone" with icon-apps rather than words (see pic). I also like their slogan "Make web not war" which is catchy.

I wish this event was more widely known and have more people coming to it as there are some good talks. Seneca staff and students did an excellent job at running this event. It felt like they do this every day.

I also had an opportunity to meet again many of my former professors and Shaz (I used to work for her as a student ambassador at student services). Tim McKeena (Seneca prof.) was extremely excited to hear my talk and gave me a small gift from Seneca.

I wish I attended more sessions but working on the booth and preparing for the presentation took most of my time.

Keep it up Seneca!


Creative Commons License
This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

6 comments:

  1. Good summary Armen. I agree that this is a fun little event. I wonder if it would be as fun if the attendance was to, say, double. (It would certainly be more difficult to find a seat in the cafeteria.)

    For me the best part of this event is always the broad range of talks and, therefore, people who come out to the event.

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  2. Thanks Lawrence!

    I would have loved to see more people and even more participation.

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  3. Hi Armen,

    I have been following some of the presentations from FSOSS this year and I have been hoping to track down your presentation. I'm sorry if I appear like a 'stalker' but I was just wondering if you have or would be putting it up.

    I am very interested in Mozilla's release engineering internship program and so I am trying to gather anything I can. I'm sure I am not the only one looking for this and you probably have a million other things to do so I understand if you can not do this.

    Also, I wanted to say I really enjoyed last year's presentation, especially the info on Buildbot.

    So thanks from over the water in Ireland!

    Kind regards,
    Jordan

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  4. Hey Jordan,
    I am glad you liked my presentation from last year.
    I will be posting the new one this coming week.

    Jordan did you had the chance to meet John O'Duinn at Ireland last month?

    cheers,
    Armen

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  5. Hi Jordan,
    Not sure of how much use would my presentation be as I have a lot of pictures/diagrams and very minimal speaker notes as I knew them by heart.

    https://github.com/armenzg/playground/blob/master/mozilla/slides/presentations/RelEng-release_process.ppt

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  6. Hi Armen,

    Thanks a lot I will pull that this evening. I didn't get to meet John while he was here but I was given the chance to talk to him on Monday. Thanks again for this. I'll let you know how I get on.

    Jordan

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