Just because his name is Carlos Santana doesn’t mean it’s the Santana you’ve been listening to for all of your life … but it might be if you’re an open-sourcer.
OK, it’s a clickbait headline. While it’s true that Carlos Santana will speak at this year’s ATO, it won’t be the Carlos Santana whose performed at Woodstock and who’s still putting out great albums nearly 55 years later.
The Carlos Santana who will speak at this year’s All Things Open is pretty cool though. He’s a senior Kubernetes Solutions Architect at AWS, leading Amazon EKS Solutions in the Worldwide Application Modernization. He also comes to the table with plenty of speaking experience before a wide range of audiences, and has more than 20 years of experience in distributed systems, open source, containers, serverless, and devops. Also, he is a CNCF Ambassador and contributor to CNCF projects Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Crossplane, and Knative.
He sounds perfect for All Things Open, right? The only thing that would be more perfect would be if he were introduced with the other Carlos Santana’s wailing guitar in the background.
His upcoming appearance at All Things Open, a premiere open source conference that’s held in Raleigh, North Carolina every fall (and my favorite conference, BTW), was made public today when conference organizers announced the conference’s third round of speakers, a list that includes Karen Chin, a developer advocate at Intuit; Tom Callaway, principal open-source strategist at Amazon; Vijay Samuel, an observability architect at eBay; and 16 others.
Previously, the conference announced 45 additional speakers from Round One and Round Two, which includes some open-source home run hitters. Just a sample of who’s included in the mix: Jono Bacon, founder of Jono Bacon Consulting who rose to fame as Ubuntu’s community manager back in the distribution’s early days; Jim Jagielski, currently the head of open-source program office at Salesforce but who’s better known as one of the co-founders of Apache Software Foundation; Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona; Dave Stokes, a technology evangelist at Percona who’s been speaking at open-source events since the beginning of time; and John Mertic, a program director at Linux Foundation.
As far as I can tell, All Things Open hasn’t yet announced its roster of keynote speakers, which isn’t surprising since the event isn’t scheduled to go onstage until October 15. As Rachel Maddow says, “Watch this space.” We’ll keep you informed.
But Wait, There’s More — Like, Swag
The event also announced the design for this year’s T-shirts today — and as usual they’re super cool. Also as usual, they keep with ATO’s “Spaceman” theme — but this year they’re especially rad (is that term still used?), probably because this year’s event marks the 11th year for All Things Open — meaning it’s the start of the conference’s second decade. Because of this, the theme for this year’s conference is “Rebirth,” and the T-shirts reflect that.
Want to Go? Here’s How
As always, this All Things Open will be held at the Raleigh Convention Center in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, a city I’ve been known to call open-source’s Silicon Valley.
If you want to go, you’re already too late to hit the Early Bird Special — that ended last week — but the cost of attending ATO is a bargain when compared to similar events put on by Linux Foundation. How does $149 for both days sound (or for just $10 you can live stream the conference and watch it at home)? In addition, on the day before the official event starts, there are two free co-located events — Inclusion & Diversity in Open Source which includes stand-alone talks, panel and group discussions with leading technologists and thought leaders, and a networking social; and Community Leadership Summit that will include stand-alone talks, as well as moderated discussions with community and industry leaders from all over the U.S and the world.
After missing the last three years due to the plague thing (although the event still happened in 2021 and 2022, I didn’t want to chance it), this year I’m going to be back and proudly wearing T-shirts from my All Things Open collection. Look me up. I like meeting people. 🙂
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
I’m sure you are delighting Carlos Santana with yet another comparison of him to the musician with the same name. He’s probably as delighted as Michael Bolton in “Office Space” to have yet another person make the comparison.
IGnatius T Foobar He’s already commented about it on social media. He laughed. Thought it was funny. I was relieved.