I launched GeekAustin, as an independent website, shortly after closing Desert Books in 1999. My intent was provide a place to keep in touch with all the programmers/admins/techies/hackers/crackers/wireheads who I had gotten to know over the 10 years that I ran bookstores along the drag. The original GeekAustin site ran on Slashcode, and was more or less an Austin version of Slashdot. Half a dozen people were involved in setting up and contributing to the original site. _fool and The Mighty Robbo helped configure the original server and schooled me on system administration. Orion helped configure Slash, set up the mail server, and contributed many of the original stories. Following the first dot.bust, many of the original crew left the velvet rut of Austin for higher pay and better opportunities. By 2003, I was more or less the sole contributor. In early 2008, because of security vulnerabilities in the ancient version of Slashcode I was running, I converted the site to WordPress. Most of the older stories are offline, but are archived.
Because the original purpose of GeekAustin was to stay in touch with the tech community around Europa/Desert Books, parties were always a big deal. Any significant event in the tech world was sufficient reason for a GeekAustin party: whether it was the release 1.0 of Mozilla, the one billionth second of Unix, or Donald Knuth’s birthday. We hosted a somewhat infamous Adult Webmasters’ Party at SXSW (Does anyone have pictures?), and before Brad sold it to SixApart, we hosted an annual SXSW Live Journal party each year, where Brad would fly out to be the guest of honor. We also had the pleasure of co-sponsoring Symbiot’s Linux Top Gun events — which gathered the largest group of network hackers ever seen in Austin.
My fondness for throwing tech parties actually pre-date GeekAustin by about a decade. It can pretty much be traced back to Bruce Sterling’s first visit to Europa Books in 1990. Soon after his visit, Bruce began telling his friends about the store, and over the next few years, Bruce introduced me to Paco Nathan, Steven Levy, Bill Gibson, Lebkowsky, Mark Frauenfelder, the staff at Wired… and the list goes on. Whenever one of these folks came to town, we’d have a booksigning/party/whatever at the store. We hosted events for Boing Boing (when it was a print magazine) and the EFF, among others. It wasn’t until this week, while on my morning walk, that it occurred to me what a huge effect Bruce had upon the direction of the store, as well as my migration into the tech sphere.
The early GeekAustin parties were attended by a pretty hardcore tech crowd. There was a nice mix of brilliant and crazy folks along with the expected zealots, misfits, and CTOs. I did have to ban numerous males who didn’t know how to act around women. I also had to ban the recruiters whose vocabulary consisted only of “Do you know Java?”. But if you knew how to navigate the crowd, you could always count on fascinating conversations.
I’m making a conscious effort to move the GeekAustin website, and the event themes, back into a more tech heavy direction. Call me selfish, but I would rather have a discussion about grid/cloud computing with someone who understands parallel algorithms, than have a conversation about the Semantic Web with a group of advertising/PR people who have no concept of the difference between relational and hierarchical data models.
The next GeekAustin event is a return to roots.
On Tuesday, August 19th, GeekAustin be hosting, along with OWASP-Austin, a presentation on openSIMS — a radical new way to deal with network security threats. Presenting will be Mando Escamilla and whurley of the openSIMS project. Although some extremely complicated things go on under the hood, Mando and whurley have a knack for explaining it at the street-level. The event will be held at Union Park. Presentation in the boom boom room, and drinks in the main room. Details will be on GeekAustin Monday. For Facebook users, the facebook page is here.
It is good to be excited.
-Linear
August 10th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
I’m with you on this direction Lynn. I’m tired of dealing with recruiters and suits. I remember the days when I was in HS meeting up at the mall for 2600 meetings in San Antonio. I remember hitting up the LUG’s when I was in different cities through the early 2000’s.
I think that groups/events such as GeekAustin have a natural tendency to slide around, and it’s good to step back every now and then and right the ship.
I’ll see you Aug 19.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:43 am
This is a great move Lynn. Austin needs the tech-core that is GeekAustin to stay true to those roots. While I may not understand everything presented, I find the topics fascinating and regularly find myself hitting Google to learn more about the technologies, patterns and concepts presented. GeekAustin pushes me forward and more importantly it pushes Austin forward.
I’ll see you on the 19th!
August 11th, 2008 at 10:24 am
So, so awesome. This weekend at Defcon I realized that it’s time for a change.
Man, F those business guys and their stupid suits and their pittance wages/equity shares. I want to hang out with smart people and hack on stuff and not worry about “monetization strategies”. F those guys.
Thanks for leading the way :).
August 11th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Hot damn, might actually be able to make it. Here’s to hoping. :)