SCaLE 10x done, thanks to BoF leaders and SCaLE volunteers

SCaLE 10x was a grand time. Thanks to all of the volunteers that make it happen every year for us! SCaLE adds new things and puts on a very organized, successful experience every year. The volunteers who make it happen are amazing.

Thanks also to the BoF session leaders. I headed up the BoFs this year and appreciate those who volunteered to run a session. The session leaders have my thanks and at least a few have my thanks for their patience as SCaLE and I worked out how I was going to run the BoFs and getting me the access I needed in order to update the schedule.

This was my first year helping with the BoFs and I got good feedback from some of the session leaders. I still owe the SCaLE conference committee a writeup about how the BoFs went. Overall they went well, but they definitely need better on site promotion in the future. There also needs to be more information than the titles available. A couple of the BoFs need special instructions. Phil's annual key signing party is a special event, so it gets a description there, but there should also be something on the BoFs page.

One advantage for the BoFs is that the hallway track is always great at SCaLE :).

Overall, I think the BoFs went well, but there's lot of room for improvement. We almost filled all of the rooms for two hours on both Friday and Saturday nights. We need a way to do dinner and BoF without needing to resort to paying for hotel catering. We had a couple of sponsored BoFs, which was awesome, but that was way out of the price range of most session leaders. At the same time, I would have like to have had a real dinner before 22:00 :).

My talk on Nginx was standing room only and went well. I appreciate the audience participation, especially since a couple of audience members were able to increase the scope of my presentation and answer some questions that were beyond my experience. Based on the response from an inside joke about something from my Tunneling With SSH talk from last year, I'd say many people this year also attended my talk last year. That was really cool. Now I have to come up with something really interesting for next year :).

When the videos go up, everyone should watch Deb Nicholson's Messaging Free Software talk and spot's Selling Free Software talk. Deb tells us to "help people feel like a badass".

Owen DeLong reprised his IPv6 Essentials for Linux Administrators, which seemed to be the most talked about presentation last year. It was a fun presentation. I learned a lot and Owen was an entertaining presenter.

I'm looking forward to the videos being posted as there's at least a dozen talks I missed. Heck, there were four I wanted to see when I was giving my talk :).