fisl days 1 & 2
April 20th, 2006 Stephen Lau
wow. what a whirlwind. i now firmly believe that fisl has to have the most energy of any conference i’ve been to. this place is rockin’!
so. day 1. i finally got all my packages, and headed to the conference hall with the Java dudes. Tatiana did a fantastic job of getting Sun a prime prime spot on the floor as a community meeting point. we setup a coffee machine and gave out free coffee - which has got to be one of the best ideas (courtesy of simon i believe) for drawing a crowd to your area. our “booth” was setup perfectly. rather than a traditional closed booth, it was setup as a bunch of comfy chairs, and tables for people to hang out in and meet up and chat. we had a center table with a w2100z workstation and eye-catching 24.1″ LCD. francois, fernanda, and rebecca were demoing JavaDB, while i was demoing Solaris/OpenSolaris. i ran tons of Dtrace, BrandZ, Dtrace AND BrandZ, ZFS, and Zones demos. suffice to say, people were amazed.
i brought a ton of freebies down of course, and went through the SXCR DVDs and Nexenta CDs in a blaze. i got a ton of great feedback from people saying they loved the fact that we (Sun) were there, and giving out other people’s OS’s (Nexenta). i really think it got us a lot of good cred.
at 5pm, i gave a talk with a quick intro on the OpenSolaris project and community. i then borrowed greatly from nils and edp’s slides and presented on BrandZ. at the end, i gave a demo of BrandZ. i’d hoped to have time to do a DTrace of a BrandZ app - but ran out of time… but i hope i made up for it by doing tons of DTrace/BrandZ demos at the booth area. the room was packed, which was great. every seat was taken, and there were maybe about 20-30 people standing in the back too - so it was really well attended. i only hope it was well received as well. 
that night i went out to dinner with the Sun folks and the SOJAVA folks to a churrasco (the brasilian bbq) where i had my first churrasceria and caipirinha. these will be the subject of another blog entry later.
the second day was mostly a repeat of the first day. except i got to meet and chat with a people… notably, Keith Packard, Miguel de Icaza, and Marcelo Tosatti. i talked with a bunch of people in various communities (Fedora Ambassadors, Brasil’s Ministry of Science & Technology, Ubuntu-BR, etc.) about the OpenSolaris community, what we were doing right, and more importantly: what we could be doing better. i took a ton of photos and plan to post them when i get back to a place with a better network connection (Hey Sheraton! improve your freaking internet connection. the connection here is dismal)
btw - the Ubuntu-BR guys rock. they were totally plugging Nexenta/OpenSolaris at their user group booth and giving away CDs for us as well. i got along great with them, we did the obligatory t-shirt swap and had a great time. really friendly bunch of guys. we grabbed all-you-can-eat pizza for dinner (at 12:30am!!!) and went to a FISL party after the conference on the second day.
overall, so far, i think things are going pretty well. there has been a ton of enthusiasm around OpenSolaris. a surprisingly high number of people are aware of Nexenta and were really interested in it (so i’m really glad we burned the livecds and brought them). people showed a lot of interest in the OpenSolaris project, and were really receptive to the idea of an open source Solaris.
lessons learned:
1. if you give out a CD, put the username/password on the disc art.
2. if you give out an install DVD, people will want a live CD. if you give out live CDs, people also want an install CD. i think it would have been even better to have brought Nexenta LiveCDs as well as install CDs
3. everyone and their mother wants a t-shirt at FISL.
4. if you go to FISL, and your lactose intolerant: bring lactaid. 99% of the food they sell has some form of dairy on it or in it.
5. if you don’t bring lactaid, bring immodium. seriously. it sucks being lactose intolerant
okay, i’ve got tons more to blog - i’m sure i’m missing details. but it’s almost 3am and i’m exhausted.
[tags: OpenSolaris]
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