Deep in the Heart of Open Source
Recently, several of us attended O’Reilly’s OSCON conference in Austin, Texas. OSCON provided the perfect opportunity for us to meet and interact with people that we wouldn’t normally encounter beyond their github or irc handle, so we were pretty excited to go.
Our big takeaway was how far everyone is willing to stretch themselves in the spirit of open source, recognizing that juggling their desire for other people to learn is just as important as opening up their code. (HT to PayPal for literally teaching everyone to juggle.)
Discussions with speakers often extended the actual length of the sessions, and we ended up bumping into attendees out about town later in the night, shared a few drinks and discussed common issues. In between splitting time working the Salesforce booth and attending talks, we managed to follow up with the Docker folks on contributing to the Docker beta to engage with firmware developers trying to solve the same problems of server management while trying to be vendor agnostic.
We also learned that you should never underestimate the power of a good local beer to get the conversation flowing. As we set up our Salesforce-connected kegbot demo–which measures beer consumption via flow sensors connected to an arduino controller that posts via the Salesforce API, we encountered teething problems on the first day. Despite having tested (and containerized, obviously) the software components repeatedly, we did not count on incompatible hardware, specifically different-sized beer keg connectors.
Luckily, Austin is a city that is big on home brew, and a quick trip to get the compatible components from the brew store solved our issues quickly. A win for open standards, and it helped us create the beer consumption graph (in 15 min slots of epoch no less) over two days of OSCON that you see below:
While this graph clearly shows Thirsty Goat Amber was way more popular than Honey Cider, I’d really like to point out the peak that corresponded to when we were tinkering with our beer line flow sensors and had the corresponding arduino setup out for debugging in plain view.
Having misbehaving hardware and software components out for debugging generated way more interest from attendees than any fancy graphics or even free beer, which best sums up the true spirit of OSCON for us. At its heart, open source is all about improvement through exposure and collaboration, no matter how mature or broken your project might be.
If you missed OSCON, you can watch several of the keynotes here, and download many slide decks here.
Originally published at medium.com on June 9, 2016.
