As you probably read from our twitterfeed, we were at POSSCON 2009 Saturday. It was a great event as expected; lots of information was disseminated and the networking scene was vibrant as usual. Here’s a quick recap of POSSCON 2009:
Lee Congdon, Red Hat CEO speaking at POSSCON 2009
10:15: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat started off the morning with his keynote address The State of Open Source Today. This speech provided the backdrop for the rest of the event. In an informative speech, Congdon provided a nice overview as to the importance of open source software in modern business applications. In addition, he bought the audience up to speed as to the state of affairs in the open source community, using Red Hat as a backdrop example.
11:00: Here, the conference split up into two tracks, one for developers, another for business. Greg DeKoenigsberg gave a captivating presentation, as usual, in the developers track about the importance of the community in any open source model. He also encouraged others to get involved, sharing some entertaining anecdotes along the way
Greg DeKoenigsberg speaks about the 'pyramid' nature of open-source projects
11:45: Chris Eargle (Self-proclaimed kodefuguru) showed off some of his favorite open source tools, including Notepad++ and other applications he uses at his .NET development job.
Chris Eargle shares some of his favorite open source tools
2:30 Ravi Ravindra talks about how Blue Cross Blue Shield uses Linux virtualization to power its web applications
Other Highlights
Dr. Buell does what he does best... Engage students. This time the topic of choice is parallel computing.
USC students go to play with the One Laptop Per Child laptop
Special thanks to Travis "tripod man" Taylor for assisting with photo taking and comic relief
Overall, the conference was a great success. Saturday saw host to a record crowd for the conference, including a diverse group of students, developers, businessmen, and other open source enthusiasts. The talks were informative, and entertaining. Special thanks to Todd Lewis and Verbus Counts at Palmetto Computer Labs for putting this together, USC College of Engineering and Computing for hosting, and all off the attendees for coming. Definitely looking forward to next year!
Complete photo gallery coming soon…
