SCaLE 20x recap
SCaLE 20x was a very compact conference for me this year. Due to obligations I couldn’t arrive until late Friday night. My entire Sunday was dedicated to Open Source Career Day (OSCD). That left me Saturday during the day before my Introduction to Nextcloud talk (video).
I did get time to quickly swing by the expo hall. There I got to say hi to Jill, Ryan and Michael working the Destination Linux podcast’s booth. Jill was also in the LinuxChix LA booth next to DL. I got to chat briefly and separately with Pono and Bradley at the Software Conservancy booth. Jos and Charlotte were both at the Nextcloud booth when I swung by before my talk. I took a picture at the booth and added it to my presentation.
KDE and LOPSA were next to each other again this year, so I got to swing by both. I talked to LOPSA about participating in OSCD next year and also for the SeaGL Career Expo in November. There were several vendors I wanted to visit, but at most got to wave hi to some friends as I zoomed by.
Most of Saturday during the day was in the Next Generation track. We started with a kid talking about how to create and post videos, so other people can follow what you’re doing. For some reason he mostly posts about video games. Next we went over to the Next Gen play room, which had a NASA station, a 3D printer, some drones and another half dozen stations.
Saturday night was the Careers BoF where we had Speed Pitches. It was an opportunity to practice the interview response to "Tell us about yourself." or "Why do you want to work here?".
After the BoF I spent the rest of the evening at the game night. This was the first year I got to really hang out there. We enjoyed one of the escape rooms and lots of the games that were setup.
Sunday I spent the entire day giving career counseling sessions for OSCD. I didn’t get a chance to watch any of our talks. I’m looking forward to catching up on them.
OSCD topics were:
I want to thank Nish for volunteering time to take headshots for us this year! That was a new feature for SCaLE and we got some great photos. The headshots looked like they were really popular.
Thanks also to RaiseMe and SCaLE for working with the OSCD committee to put on a great career event. Thanks to OpenSource.com for publishing my article on OSCD to help us promote the event.
For Open Source Career Day we did not have enough counsellors. That’s my fault, I needed to do better recruiting. We had a couple spontaneous volunteers help out. Thanks to all our volunteer counselors, they’re integral and I know from personal experience that they provide great insight. Thanks also to everyone who signed up for counselling sessions, you’re why we were there.
Unfortunately I got rather sick while travelling. It wasn’t COVID, but knocked me out for a bit. Still recovering, but back to being somewhat functional and catching up on lots of post-event obligations.
That includes getting back to preparing for SeaGL in November. I’m co-chairing the SeaGL finance committee for this year’s hybrid conference. We are working to have first class experience for both in person (Seattle) and online participants. I’m looking forward to hosting a hybrid Career Expo this year after learning from my experience with SCaLE’s OSCD.
Please let me know if you’d like to sponsor SeaGL this year :).
Our program team got SeaGL’s CfP open in time for SCaLE.