This past weekend, I attended the excellent #OpenWest conference, and I presented Scaling RabbitMQ.
The volunteers that organized the conference deserve a huge amount of thanks. I can’t imagine how much work it was. I should also thank the conference sponsors.
A local group of hardware engineers designed an amazing conference badge, built from a circuit board. They deserve a big “high-five”. There was a soldering lab where I soldered surface mount components for the first time in my life – holding the components in place with tweezers. I bought the add-on kit for $35 that included a color LCD screen and Parallax Propeller chip. It took me 45 minutes to do the base kit, and two hours to do the add-on kit. I breathed a sigh of relief when I turned on the power, and it all worked.
The speakers did a great job, and I appreciate the hours they spent preparing. I wish I could have attended more of the sessions.
Among others, I attended sessions on C++11, Rust, Go lang, Erlang, MongoDB schema design, .NET core, wireless security, Salt Stack, and digital privacy.
I’m going to keep my eye on Rust, want to learn and use Go, and use the new beacon feature of Salt Stack. Sometime in the future, I’d like to use the new features of C++11.
The conference was an excellent place to have useful side-conversations with vendors, speakers, and past colleagues. It was a great experience.