Open Source Bridge: not this year, sorry!

[denise]

I'm really sorry for the length of time it's taken me to make a final call on this -- I've been hoping that I would have the brainpower to deal with it, but my physical and mental health have both just been absolute shit lately, and I just have not had the cope. (And it's the kind of thing I can't delegate, not without also handing over the DW card, yadda.)

So, we will not be doing any kind of official DW trip to OSB this year -- I seriously considered a "yes, we will bring people, but you'll have to book your own travel and get reimbursed", but even that level of coordination is just beyond me at the moment. I'll be attending and speaking myself, and I need to reserve my (very few) spare cycles for talk prep and doing my own travel.

If you are attending on your own, I'm happy to meet up with people and hang out during, as long as I don't have to arrange anything! (Jen and I are staying at the Paramount.)

I'm sorry, folks; I'll do my best to make the call earlier next year!

Comments

[denise]

I am considering between "take people to OSB" and "take people to another conf", so if there's another conf that might benefit DW volunteers that you know of, let me know!

Conferences that would benefit DW volunteers

[brainwane]

I imagine you've heard of basically all of these, but here goes anyway:

I've never been to self.conference or Strange Loop but I hear good things about the talks and the attendees.

PyCon North America just released its schedule and there's a bunch of stuff on there, as usual, that is not Python-specific: on testing, OAuth, code review, mentoring, data wrangling, Unicode, etc. If you want to hit a conference where there are high-quality talks but your team doesn't feel as much pressure to go to them (since only some of them are relevant to you) and can spend more time hacking and socializing, this might be an oddly good choice!

Have you any interest in turning WisCon (panel signups are open!) into a DW conf this year? It'd be super interesting to kind of run a low-key continuous hackathon in the spontaneous programming room and see how many new volunteers come out of it. :)

And I'm always hearing good things about Allied Media Conference. Lots of activist technologists.

If DW particularly wants to grow expertise in a specific field (frontend, mobile, API, what have you), I could suggest good conferences for those. For instance, for API design, the low-key RESTfest is a great place to learn from lots of folks.

[brainwane]

In case you were curious, dates for OSBridge are set and they've kicked off planning.