What a difference 30 minutes makes: Early Friday morning — 8 a.m. is early Friday morning for most — the registration area for SCALE 13x was relatively quiet and lightly populated with folks checking in, ready for a day of SCALE 13x. By 8:30, the line was around the lobby and down the hall.
Attendance for SCALE looks like it may break previous records. Steve Bibayoff, who works the Free Software Foundation booth, asked me Friday evening if his badge number was any indication of how many people have registered so far.
His badge number is a number just south of 3100; by a factor of less than 10.
The answer to his question is “yes.”
And Steve registered on Friday afternoon.
Oh, the humanity — wall-to-wall!
Other than getting the streaming video up and running for the sessions on Friday — you can watch the streaming video this weekend here, just go to the schedule and find the time and the room and voila! — SCALE 13x Friday went off without a hitch.
For the first time in SCALE history, all 13 years of it, the expo floor opened on Friday, with the exhibitors now having three days instead of two to promote their wares: software or hardware. Free beer — literally — flowed on Friday afternoon, thanks to Hewlett-Packard, which provided food and drink in the exhibit hall.
From all indications, many of the sessions were SRO. Owen DeLong’s popular IPv6 presentation had to turn away folks, but they did finally squeeze in everyone who wanted to attend the Docker presentation given by Jerome Petazzoni. The tracks — Mentoring, Infrastructure.Next, Ubucon — were all well-attended during the course of the day.
The day wrapped up with UpSCALE Talks — patterned after O’Reilly’s Ignite Talks where slides are advanced every 20 seconds and speakers, whether they like it or not, have to keep up — and with Bad Voltage Live. The latter is Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Stuart Langridge, and Bryan Lunduke, together again in the same room, and performing their podcast to a standing-room-only crowd, with the help of folks like SCALE chair Ilan Rabinovitch.
NOTES:
Cast of characters: It’s not the Algonquin Round Table (though the table I do sit at is round), but the digerati that gather in the SCALE 13x media/speaker room during the course of the day is pretty astounding: so far, Thomas Cameron, Matthew Williams, Hannah Anderson, Bryan Lunduke, Rikki Endsley, Phillip Ballew, Corey Quinn, Linux Magazine’s Markus Feilner, Nathan Willis, Deb Nicholson, John Mark Walker, Kara Sowles, and others make for interesting conversations in the room throughout the course of the day.
Signing the board: I could have John Hancocked the thing — signing in huge letters — but I didn’t. But the Hewlett-Packard wall was being signed by folks stopping by and I couldn’t resist putting my signature on it.
What to expect today: Saturday should be another packed day. Again, don’t forget you can check the schedule and find the session you want, and then stream it. Also I promise more pictures tomorrow. Promise.
Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero
