Contributed by jj on Tue Sep 30 05:39:45 2008 (GMT)
from the Vor-Bju-Det dept.
As mentioned before, the Swedish OpenBSD crowd got yet another chance to meet for a OpenBSD conference this autumn.
Here is my own view on the event:
The two previous Slackathons were big successes, I had lots
of friends (not all OpenBSD-related) come talk about stuff
surrounding BSD, open source or computing in general. One of
the things I've been slowly planning came from the interview
with Niklas Hallqvist in the first Slackathon, where he said he
might get back into OpenBSD development for a short time if
someone arranged for a developer gathering. So this year, I
didn't just plan for a one-day event, but set my sights on
a hack-n-slack event.
The slacking part is well covered, many of the visitors are
now what you would call 'regulars', making sure they arrive
in time for all of the talks, pockets full of ca$h to donate
and pre-announcing their attendance so they can get a piece
of the stew I offer the visitors. But I also wanted to get a
hack-part going, hopefully without spending a fortune, since
the Slackathon event is a no-entrance conference.
I mailed the developers before the event, asking who could
hold a talk, but also if they would like to arrive a few days
early and hack away. Since there isn't a long line of wealthy
sponsors, the only thing I knew I could offer was couches at
my friends' places. I was astonished to see so many developers
wanting to come over for a three day pre-Slackathon hack event.
The list ended up being: andreas@, miod@, gilles@, reyk@, henning@,
art@, maja@, johan@, jj@, thib@, tobias@, oga@, rainer@ and blambert@.
Also, the number of OpenBSD users that could muster up a few
bucks from their jobs to sponsor flights for the developers was also
a pleasant surprise. Given the fact that most of the visiting
developers were europeans and the low-cost flights seem to pass by
Sweden, I was soon having some 10+ developers wanting to come
over. Some of them actually refused getting their flights paid,
so in the end, the travel costs weren't all that high.
I got a room set up at work and had the developers there from
Wednesday to Friday, with a evening dinner scheduled on the
first two nights and a beer-tasting session on the third.
All in all, having a pre-conference hack session was very well
received by the developers. Also, I collected a small list of stuff
that was fixed/worked on during these days:
- miod@ fixed some acpi and azalia bugs on the amd64-capable HP
laptop donated to him by johan@.
- henning@ finished the ntp DNS issue, lots of performance work in
PF and some smaller BGP work.
- andreas@ got back into openbsd hacking after many years of slow
committing, also cleaning up in the getpwent() and getpw*_r() calls,
and finally some work on amd64 "boot -d" support for MP kernels.
- oga@ finally got time to port GEM (Graphics Execution Manager),
to X.org although untested at this time.
- gilles@ is working on a out-of-src smtpd, so this time allowed him to implement
aliases, forwards, basic loop detection, part of the virtuser
code, use of an external mda and finish the relay code.
- tobias@ plugged a memory leak in OpenCVS and worked on other things
that need to be reviewed first before they are committed.
Apart from all this, having other developers eye-to-eye really helps
when trying to get upcoming designs right and solving small issues
along the way.
Over to the Slackathon on the saturday:
It is designed to be a one-day event, from 12 to 22-something,
with a presentation every hour.
Only one speaker fell out, so my schedule almost worked this
year. We had Gilles man the donation desk most of the time, and
of course my trusted friends and colleagues doing sales, cafeteria
and all kinds of invisible work like fixing the network and so on.
Big thanks to all of them (Johan, Robert, Janj, Simon, Marcus, cd, Mi, Patrik).
We have held all the Slackathons in a 65-people lecture room, and this
year it was finally too small. We had people sitting on the stairs,
so I'm going to have to move to something bigger if it's going to
grow like this - a very pleasant problem. We had a Slackathon
t-shirt made for the event, which I gave to all the speakers, the
developers and the helpers. The few shirts that were left, we auctioned
to the visitors, getting a 100Eur and two 70Eur final bids for the
three t-shirts sold this way, with optional developer signatures
written on them. Thanks a lot to those three buyers!
We had visitors from Riga, Norway and Finland, developers from the US,
Iceland, UK, Germany and France, so I feel safe to say, it isn't
a Swedish-only event anymore. Pictures taken on the event by Vladi
are available here.
The results: we had something like 1500EUR in direct donations
and cafeteria sales profits, a handful of companies that funded
tickets for flying in developers, and a $1000 donation from BSDfund.org.
And a bunch of happy users and developers.
See you all next year.
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![[topicconf]](images/topicconf.jpg)
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The 2008 Slackathon event.
