Three days of this week were taken up by the UKUUG Spring 2010 conference, which I seemed to volunteer to lead the organisation on once again (and for next year as well by the looks of it!). I’ve still not fully recovered, probably as a result of going down with a cold the morning after the last day of the conference, but have nearly finished emailing all the speakers and sponsors to say thank you, and uploading the slides to the conference wiki.
Tuesday involved a tutorial on the SCons build system, by Russel Winder. I struggled a bit with some of the exercises as I’m not a Python programmer (it’s on my ‘things to learn’ list), but I was sufficiently convinced to use SCons for any new projects where I need a build system, as it’s vastly superior in terms of usability to both make and ant. Russel is also an excellent tutor who gets the blend of teaching and humour spot on, which made the day an enjoyable experience.
Wednesday and Thursday were the main conference days, with talks ranging from FreeBSD’s virtual network stacks to a live demo of setting up Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud in 30 minutes (I’m still amazed that nothing went wrong with the multi-projector and network setup!). There were also some lightning talks which involved a brave but ultimately unsuccessful defence of PHP, some Perl madness from Matt S Trout, a rant about multicore processors and a quick introduction to Access Space. Simon also managed a plug for Currybeer, amongst other geek groups in Manchester.
We also had a social programme which started on the Monday night with a few drinks, led into free beer (courtesy of antibodyMX) and curry on the Tuesday, a conference dinner on the Wednesday and more drinks on Thursday evening. This meant that I effectively spent 72 hours running a conference with no rest beyond three lots of 6 hours sleep, for which my immune system promptly punished me for the next three days.
Anyway, that’s Spring 2010 over, now to start planning for 2011…