I visit ApacheCon.
Apparently ApacheCon is in my own backyard this year... I guess my invitation got lost in the mail. I found out about this from my good friend over at Interface21, Neelan Choksi. See here, for an episode where Neelan, forgot to pay his respects the last time he cruised through my neighborhood. This morning, Neelan graciously invited me to lunch, letting me know that ApacheCon--the annual high mass of the distributed Apache development community--was going on at the Omni downtown.
So I met him for lunch, and we decided to go to ApacheCon afterwards. Funny that it took a Spring guy to invite me to this. Walking in the place, I get a feeling of deja vu, like time has stood still. It's a lot of the same people, just older. Developers are complaining that this is not a user conference, it's a developer conference. I see familiar faces and not so familiar faces. I meet people I had never met but always knew of, like Mark Brewer of Covalent and Craig Russell of JDO fame. Some people are excited to see me, some of them still hold grudges. One guy proudly shows me a slide he used for his business track presentation, a picture of me dressed as Flavor Flav on his laptop, but also wants to let me know that he really took offense at my "Professional Open Source" description of JBoss. He felt this was a put-down of Apache as amateurs. I mumble something about this being us talking about ourselves. We weren't thinking about them when coming up with our auto-definition, by definition of an auto-definition. All in all, a good experience. I feel a bit like Johnny Drama at ComiCon.
So I met him for lunch, and we decided to go to ApacheCon afterwards. Funny that it took a Spring guy to invite me to this. Walking in the place, I get a feeling of deja vu, like time has stood still. It's a lot of the same people, just older. Developers are complaining that this is not a user conference, it's a developer conference. I see familiar faces and not so familiar faces. I meet people I had never met but always knew of, like Mark Brewer of Covalent and Craig Russell of JDO fame. Some people are excited to see me, some of them still hold grudges. One guy proudly shows me a slide he used for his business track presentation, a picture of me dressed as Flavor Flav on his laptop, but also wants to let me know that he really took offense at my "Professional Open Source" description of JBoss. He felt this was a put-down of Apache as amateurs. I mumble something about this being us talking about ourselves. We weren't thinking about them when coming up with our auto-definition, by definition of an auto-definition. All in all, a good experience. I feel a bit like Johnny Drama at ComiCon.
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