Elze's wrap of Texas Linux Fest

Unfortunately, none of the GeekAustin staff were in town to cover the inaugural Texas Linux Fest. Fortunately, Elze Hamilton (@elze) of geekitude.com (blog) covered the event for us. - Lynn

Texas Linux Fest was dedicated not just to Linux, but to open source software in general. It had something for everyone no matter what level of involvement with open source community a person might be looking for, technical or nontechnical.

In his talk "Open Source from the Trenches: How to Get Involved with Open Source and be Successful", Chris Aniszczyk laid out three key principles: find a newbie-friendly open source project, find a mentor, and brand yourself. The Senior Software Engineer at EclipseSource emphasized that newbie-friendliness is an important aspect that's not shared by many open source projects. Unfortunately, you can't really tell how friendly a project is to beginners from its web page on Sourceforge. Thus he does not recommend Sourceforge as a primary place to look for a project to get involved in. I'm not sure if he gave any advice as to where to look, except by personally getting to know people working on a project of interest for you. That might also help with the second rule, finding a mentor.

As far as the third rule, branding yourself, Aniszczyk thinks developers don't understand it. This was a little surprising, because self-branding is not a new idea, and the principles he laid out were common knowledge. Make sure you are easy to find on the internet, but also that the search results you appear in are all good. Blog about your work, but be sure not to badmouth anyone, much less a potential or former employer. As a word of caution, Aniszczyk put up a screenshot of the infamous How to tweet yourself out of a job tweet.

Aniszczyk recommended ohloh.net specifically for software developers who want to promote their work.

Not being a techie is not an obstacle to community involvement. In her talk, "A Year NTEU* (pronounced In-to) Ubuntu and the Open Source Community", Amber Graner told us about her journey from a complete Linux newbie (NTEU = Non-Technical End User), to becoming a Ubuntu User Magazine contributor in one year. She spread a message that everyone, no matter how non-technical they are, can become proficient in Ubuntu. As they progress, they can participate in user forums, educating less advanced users. One can help with organizing conferences, too.

Janet Swisher and Anne Gentle

And even if you think you are non-technical, you are probably "technical" to someone else who knows less than you, said Graner, and you can help them use open source. Even a programmer Barbie can. Mattel's newest creation made an appearance in Janet Swisher's and Anne Gentle's talk on FLOSS Manuals, announcing: "Documentation is hard! Let's do programming!" As a developer, I used to think documentation wasn't hard, merely tedious. But maybe it's hard if you do it right, and FLOSS Manuals website makes it easier.

Katherine Druckman of the Linux Journal.

If you are tasked with creating a website from scratch, alone, with little or no (paid) support, turn to Drupal, said Katherine Druckman. The increasingly popular open source CMS and its community will come to your rescue. Although Druckman's talk was titled "One Woman Web Team", she emphasized you should not to try to do it all yourself, but draw on community resources. For example, if you are a programmer, ask web designers to design the look for the website. This was the second time I heard this advice in the last 4 weeks, the first one being at SXSW. And if you need some content or help pages written, or proofreading for your website, you can ask FLOSS technical writers, which they encouraged in their presentation "Benefiting From The Skills of Non-programmers".

Asking never hurts, but the answer may be "no", especially when people are asked to work for free. The "One Woman Web Team" presentation unfortunately didn't suggest ways to motivate your community to help you. That may be the hardest part when you set out to create a website armed only with free software and free help. At least the SXSW panelists had this practical advice: try trading your work with someone else -- e.g. if you are a programmer, offer to do some programming for a web designer in exchange for having them design your site.

Apart from discussions of open source community specifics, there were quite a few technical sessions. Most of them were targeted at system administrators; many paid homage to the still-hot topic of cloud computing. While there weren't many talks oriented towards developers, presentations on newly popular databases such as Cassandra, Drizzle, and MongoDB, were of interest to me as a developer.

Eric Evans, a developer on the Apache Cassandra project, and a Systems Architect in Rackspace's Cloud division, gave a talk on Cassandra database. He went into many technical details, but I found his talk somewhat lacking in context. In what circumstances would one benefit from it? If I'm writing a small application, is there any advantage of Cassandra over SQL databases? I mentioned this to a friend who was at the talk, and he said it was unclear to him too, though in his experience you don't really need Cassandra unless you have at least 50-60 database servers. He went to talk to the presenter, and came back with an impression that the presenter assumed the audience already knew the reasons to use Cassandra.

Next, Monty Taylor gave a presentation Drizzle: A Database Designed for Operations. I quickly lost track as to what kind of operations it's designed for. But his talk was sprinkled with enough nuggets of cuteness-- such as "[something-something] makes bunnies cry... actually, I don't even know what a crying bunny would look like" -- to make it a little more memorable than the previous one.

Richard Kreuter's talk about MongoDB, a document database sponsored by his company 10gen, was more illustrative than the other two. He showed some simple queries in JSON data interchange language that lets you write flexible queries to retrieve documents. This talk actually gave me ideas on how this database may be more useful than SQL databases for some purposes.

The Texas Linux Fest Lobby.

When not at presentations, people socialized in the cramped lobby of Marchessa event center, where vendors and user groups had their booths. The two most numerous groups -- Rackspace representatives and TAMU user group -- wore easy-to-confuse t-shirts in slightly different shades of maroon. HP representatives held a drawing for stuffed animals, which was somehow related to World Wildlife Fund. I didn't see even a tenuous connection to Linux, though, since none of the animals were penguins.

Some of the event logistics were non-ideal. While drinks, snacks, and pizza were available for sale, lack of free water was disappointing. Marchessa event center does not have water fountains; nor were there any jugs with water as I've come to expect at conferences. So if we wanted to stay hydrated, we had to buy bottled water at the bar. The two-tiered ticket pricing structure was also somewhat of a mystery. A $15 "Enthusiast" ticket had no restrictions compared to a $40 "TLF Supporter" ticket. The latter gave you no additional perks, except a swag-bag and a T-shirt; but if there was one thing TLF was awash in, it was free t-shirts -- every vendor was giving them away.

Randall Schwartz says to call it Linux.

The event concluded with a keynote speech by Randal L. Schwartz, the famous Perl expert. Before his speech there was a quiz, with O'Reilly books as prizes for those people in the audience who answered correctly. The only question I knew an answer to was "what open source CMS does Linux Journal use?" (Drupal), and only because of Katherine Druckman's presentation. (She's the webmistress of the Linux Journal.) That was the easiest question for everyone. Other, more difficult ones, dealt with the subtleties of system administration or GPL versioning. Still, many people knew the answers.

In his keynote talk, Randall Schwartz didn't say much new about open source, only listed the old reasons why open source software is better than proprietary. That was a bit like preaching to the choir, but it's possible that the purpose of this talk wasn't so much to convey new information, as to motivate us all to get involved. He peppered it with anecdotes from his early open-source days, when he snuck in some changes into Perl programming language under Larry Wall's radar. He dropped famous names, such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, and openly sided with one of them in the ideological battle regarding the purity of free/open source software. "I've partied with RMS, even danced with his girlfriend. I've partied with Linus, he regularly beats me at pool. Linus is more fun to party with. Hence, please... on behalf of Linus, I assert: it's Linux, not GNU/Linux. End of story.", said the concluding slide of his speech.

TXLF program promised that Sunday activities (e. g. special interest group meetings) will be announced at the keynote, but no such announcements were made, so I'm not sure if there were any Sunday activities at all. The only thing the organizers announced was afterparty -- a 6th Street pub crawl later that night. From Randall Schwartz's Twitter feed (@merlyn) it sounded like the pub crawl was a success.

-Elze Hamilton (@elze)
geekitude.com (blog)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/elzehamilton