Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I've just come back from LCA at the Wrest Point hotel and fun complex in Hobart, over the 16th to the 20th of January. It was a really great conference and keeps the bar for both social and technical enjoyment at a high level.

I stayed at a nearby AirBNB property so I could have my own kitchenette - I prefer to be able to at least make my own breakfast rather than purchase it - and to give me a little exercise each day walking to and from the conference. Having the conference in the same building as a hotel was a good thing, though, as it both simplified accommodation for many attendees and meant that many other facilities were available. LCA this year provided lunch, which was a great relief as it meant more time to socialise and learn and it also spared the 'nearby' cafes and the hotel's restaurants from a huge overload. The catering worked very well.

From the first keynote right to the last closing ceremony, the standard was very high. I enjoyed all the keynotes - they really challenged us in many different ways. Pia gave us a positive view of the role of free, open source software in making the world a better place. Dan made us think of what happens to projects when they stop, for whatever reason. Nadia made us aware of the social problems facing maintainers of FOSS - a topic close to my heart, as I see the way we use many interdependent pieces of software as in conflict with users' social expectations that we produce some kind of seamless, smooth, cohesive whole for their consumption. And Robert asked us to really question our relationship with our users and to look at the "four freedoms" in terms of how we might help everyone, even people not using FOSS. The four keynotes really linked together well - an amazing piece of good work compared to other years - and I think gave us new drive.

I never had a session where I didn't want to see something - which has not always been true for LCA - and quite often I skipped seeing something I wanted to see in order to see something even more interesting. While the miniconferences sometimes lacked the technical punch or speaker polish, they were still all good and had something interesting to learn. I liked the variety of miniconf topics as well.

Standout presentations for me were:

• Tom Eastman talking about building application servers - which, in a reversal of the 'cloud' methodology, have to sit inside someone else's infrastructure and maintain a network connection to their owners.
• Christoph Lameter talking about making kernel objects movable - particularly the inode and dentry caches. Memory fragmentation affects machines with long uptimes, and it was fascinating to hear Matthew Wilcox, Dave Chinner, Keith Packard and Christoph talking about how to fix some of these issues. That's the kind of opportunity that a conference like LCA provides.
• James Dumay's talk on Blue Ocean, a new look for Jenkins. It really brings it a modern, interactive look and I hope this becomes the new default.