Steady as a rock

It can actually be summarized in 2 words: f*ing awesome!

A slightly longer (and in no way chronological summary):

Travel

To get to EuroOscon, I had to get up at 3:30 in the morning, which you may guess is not my prefered time to wake up. The trip to Brussels was fairly uneventful, I slept through a substantial part of it. Going back home on thursday however, was a real pain in the ass. The international train was canceled, so I had to take a local train to Antwerp, which was of course a very busy train becuase the international train was canceled. After a short sprint in Antwerp, I reached an also crowded international train and sat down next to a girl from Holland, with whom I had a nice talk until she had to leave at Rotterdam. Some sleeping and reading Make magazine later I arrived at Lelystad. Home sweet home

The venue & organization

Apart from the sometimes flaky wifi, no complaints here. Very well organized and a nice hotel. The lunches were great .
The sessions

Apart from on or two talks which I wish I never had gone too, the talks were very interesting. Great keynote speakers and a nice diverse set of talks (although the web 2.0 crowd was very visible). A few highlights (for me) were

• Microformats: embedding semantic information in your HTML so html2anything convertors can be useful
• Kamaelia a framwork for orchestrating workflows, mainly targeted at multimedia but unlike gstreamer, also usable for other things
• Freedom to call sip, telepathy and more with openwengo
• Jabber beyond instant messaging
• The Conway channel evil perl guru Damian Conway showing off his nice tricks. He makes perl usable!

The people

There were lots of interesting people at the conference, it’s been a great pleasure to meet all of them. It’s too hard to remember all the names, so I won’t name anyone in particular, but the people playing werewolves and the lightning talks people were especially interesting to meet. Thanks all of you for the great times!

Django

I also briefly met Adrian Holovaty of Django fame, who is a happy Ubuntu user and offered personal support for my endeavours in transforming the Ubuntu NL site into a django powered beast. I hope he knows what h got himself into

Ubuntu & meeting Mark Shuttleworth

There were three slots featuring Ubuntu in the original program. However, Jeff Waugh canceled, reducing this number to two. When the Ubuntu BOF on wednesday started, Mark however was nowhere to be found. A short chat with mdz and elmo (thanks again guys!) revealed that Mark was not even supposed to show up. So I gave the attendees 2 simple choices: leave, because Mark is not coming, or stay and I’ll answer questions. To my surprise almost everyone chose to stay, the BOF actually was rather succesful

On thursday, Mark gave the final keynote and afterwards we had a short talk. This was undoubtedly the best part of the conference, not everyone in the Ubuntu community gets the opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation with the (in)famous sabdfl

So all in all: it was an unbelievable experience and I’m so thankful for O’Reilly allowing me to attend the conference basically for free.