I’m packing for Boston and will be there next week for LISA11. This will be my second year as part of the LISA blogging team, and after how much I enjoyed LISA last year in San Jose I wouldn’t miss this one even if it is on the other side of the country. I’ve tried to finish as much work as possible to be able to focus on the conference but for various reasons of course this was not quite possible, and actually during the first days I will even be on call… In anycase, I’m sure this is going to be a great week full of awesomeness. I will be blogging for the USENIX blog every day, so be sure to follow that for fresh articles from me and the other memebers of our team (Ben, Rikki and Matt).

If you are going to LISA11 in Boston next week, we should definitely meetup. Contact me on twitter or email.

One of the advantages of being a member of the LISA11 Blog Team is that I was able to talk and interview this year program co-chairs: Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes. This was a great honor for me especially since I’ve been a big fan of Tom’s work for many years. The full article is available on the USENIX blog: “Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes Interview”

Also my colleagues from the LISA11 blogging team (Ben, Rikki and Matt) have done some very interesting interviews with some key people from LISA11 to get you prepared for the event. Check out the USENIX blog for more from us in the next week.

Here is also a quick intro of our team: “LISA11 Next Week – Meet your blog team!“

Last week I attended Velocity 2011 in Santa Clara, CA; this was the 4th edition of Velocity and my 2nd one. This means that even if I was still very much impressed with everything what happened during these 3 days, it was not quite so mind blowing like last year, and you will be able to see this from my impressions bellow.

First impression was that this was much bigger than last year, and the numbers just released by O’Reilly demonstrate it was almost double with about 2,000 participants and another sell out (compared with 1,200 in 2010). Considering the high price of the conference (~1k) this is very impressive and interesting to see how they will host next year even more people. From a question a speaker had many people where at their first Velocity, but even so I met many friends and people I met last year. From the content point of view there was a lot of focus on mobile performance that I haven’t seen last year. Myself I mostly followed the operations track, and only a few talks in the performance track.

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This week is a special week for the Drupal community and I’m very excited to be able to attend DrupalCon 2011 in Chicago.
My employer, Promet Solutions, is one of the gold sponsors for DrupalCon and we will have many cool activities for this week prepared for this event. Last year DrupalCon 2010 San Francisco was a great event and I’m sure this one will be even better. So if you are in Chicago and coming to DrupalCon, please come by and say hi; I would love to meet you and talk about cool Drupal projects. I will also try to setup a BOF on automating Drupal installations and configurations with opscode chef, and this will be based on my chef drupal cookbook.

This week I’ll be attending LISA10 in San Jose. I’ve always wanted to go to LISA, and the fact that it was so close to our location here in San Jose made it much easier. This is going to be a full week, but hopefully fun and interesting. I’ll be part of the USENIX blogging team, meaning I’ll have to be extra focused in order to be able to take good notes and prepare at least one blog post per day. These articles will be posted on the USENIX blog, where you can find articles from other colleges in our team (Matt, Ben and Matthew), and I highly recommend to check it out for updates regularly. I will link in this post all the articles I have written during this week in case you want to follow this up.

If you are in the area and want to meetup ping me on twitter or email.

Real-World Configuration Management Workshop: Sunday I’ve attended all day the CM workshop; this was an interesting workshop, where different people shared their experiences and pains in configuration management.

Time Management for System Administrators: Monday I attended  Tom Limoncelli’s tutorial on time management for system administrators. Very educational and inspiring. I will definitely revisit his book as its been a while since I’ve read it. As takeaways, I have at least 2-3 ideas that I’m really looking forward to implement and see how I can use them to improve my productivity.

OpsCamp: Tuesday I went to OpsCamp Silicon Valley - San Jose co-located with LISA10, and even if it was sponsored by LISA this was a standalone event. It was definitely a smaller event than expected (because of this we had only one round of sessions with everyone in the same room), but it was definitely interesting and I’ve met some very smart people with a lot of experience in operations and building high performance infrastructures.

Postfix: Past, Present, and Future: Wednesday started with the opening remarks by the program chair Rudi van Drunen, followed by the opening keynote by Tony Cass from CERN. Amazing stuff; if you have the chance to see the video do that . Afterwards, in the afternoon I went to the invited talks by Dinah McNutt, Google: “The 10 Commandments of Release Engineering” and Wietse Venema on “Postfix: Past, Present, and Future”. It was amazing to be able to meet in person and chat with the author of postfix, a program that I’ve been using for many years.

Last week I was in Baltimore for the inaugural edition of Surge, a conference organized by OmniTI. Ever since I signed up for Surge2010, I sow this as a conference of Velocity quality, only without the frontend track and focusing mostly on backend topics (what I was interested anyway), and in a much more distant location than Santa Clara . This sounded interesting enough to make me want to go, as the first conference I will go in 2010 outside Silicon Valley. Also I could not pass the opportunity to hang out with my friend Andy and sync’up with what we’ve been up to during all this time.

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Being part of the LISA’10 Blog Team, I was lucky to be able to interview Rudi van Drunen, this year program chair. This was a great discussion where I got an idea on what goes behind the scenes when putting on such a big event as LISA’10. The article with the full interview is available on the USENIX Blog: “What can we expect from LISA’10?”

Also, my colleges from the LISA’10 blogging team, have done some very interesting interviews with Anne Dickison about marketing LISA’10 (by Ben Cotton) and Alan Clegg about his DNSSEC tutorial (by Matt Simmons).

As Matt Simmons announced on his blog, I’ll be one of the members of the LISA2010 blogging team. I’m really excited to be part of such a great team with Matt, Matthew and Ben, and looking forward for a great event. We will be blogging and sharing things we find interesting at LISA on the USENIX blog, that you should definitely bookmark it in case you don’t have it already. If you will be at LISA2010 definitely come say hi; I’d love to meetup and chat.

Matt’s full announcement on the USENIX blog: Introducing the 2010 LISA Blogging Team

O’Reilly’s Velocity conference is THE place you want to be if you are in the Web ops and performance field. This is the third year of the conference started by Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins and it is the place where all the important people in the field gather once a year. This is my first year I’ll be able to attend Velocityconf live here in Santa Clara and I’m very excited about it.

Anyone not able to attend Velocity live can still learn a lot of what’s going on by watching the keynotes that will be streamed live and made available later on demand. Being here, I’ll try to come up with some short blog post on what I found interesting and think might be valuable for the readers of my blog. If you are interested in something in particular ping me on twitter or send me an email, and if possible I’ll try to attend and write about it.

Today is a full workshop day and I’ll be attending some very interesting ones: “Scalable Internet Architectures”, “Cassandra Workshop”, “Infrastructure Automation with Chef” and “Cloud Security: It Ain’t All Fluffy and Blue Sky Out There!”. It should be a great day with many interesting talks, and later in the evening some cool BoFs and Ignite Sessions.

Last week I attended FreelanceCamp Pro in San Francisco, hosted by the offices of the newly open coworking facility of the main sponsor and organizer NextSpace. This event is based on a model of a BarCamp for freelancers and independent contractors.

If you don’t know what a barcamp is, this is a an “international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The day consists of sessions proposed by attendees and the schedule is created on site the morning of the event. BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn from each other in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.”

This was my first barcamp, or unconference type of event I’ve attended and I must say it has been by far the most interesting conference I’ve ever participated. So much better, engaging and with great conversation than a the usual conference where someone on the stage presents his slides. I’ve learned many things and this post is to outline my takeaways from this event. Here are just the most important ones: Read the rest of this entry »