Monday, February 1, 2010

365/30 OpsCamp: The Beginning (or, what geeks do on weekends)

365/30 OpsCamp:  Matt and Tom

"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."

C.S. Lewis


I'm a big believer in trying to push the envelope when it comes to learning new things. This is especially true when it comes to my photography and my current career (I'm an IT geek by profession). So, whenever the opportunity to learn something new or be surrounded by people doing unique and interesting things arises, I'm all for jumping in and getting involved.

This occurred on Saturday with the running of the bulls ... ok, not really. What occurred on Saturday was OpsCamp, an extension of CloudCamp, here in Austin. I won't really get into the nuts and bolts of what occurred here; others will do a far better job than I.

Basically, OpsCamp was an intellectual get-together of systems operations folks, programmers/developers, and vendors. It was an unconference. No one knew, going in, what we'd really talk about, the direction we'd go, or the final outcome, if there even was one. I don't know that anything concrete came out of this, other than a need for further work in this area.

We certainly got to ask some difficult questions, talk about some difficult subjects, and figure out who else was out there doing the things we were doing operationally. Oh, and we got a chance to tell vendors where they needed to improve their products.

In the end, I met some good people and have forged a few more relationships in my technical network that could prove useful as I move further a long in my career.

Oh, and here's a few more photos of the event. Nothing special, just some things I found interesting that caught my eye for one reason or another.

The organizer.


OpsCamp:  Dave

The session lineup.

OpsCamp: The Lineup

The Audience

OpsCamp:  The Audience

The AfterCamp

After OpsCamp

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