The main conference was fantastic:

• Clojure is awesome for concurrency
• Unix party tricks are extremely fun, and rather scary, and now I just want to disappear off teh interwebz
• Schwern taught me lots about Git – I now have a Github account and I feel a lot more confident with it!
• Repent, for the end of the Unix epoch is nigh!
• Pia Waugh can talk very fast, particularly given some sleep deprivation
• bunnie’s keynote provided some very interesting insights into the world of consumer manufacturing, particularly pricing
• TBL can speak even faster than Pia – this was actually problematic…
• Asheesh Laroia and OpenHatch are pretty awesome
• Paul Fenwick can talk very, very fast given a 90 second timeslot…

Anyway, it was awesome. I highly recommend it, and I’m already planning to make my way to Perth for 2014.

Anyway, I’m at linux.conf.au 2013 here in the most wonderful city of Canberra. It’s my first LCA, and so far I’m rather liking it.

Today is Day 2, where we had a most excellent keynote by Radia Perlman, the inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol among many other important networking things. There are a few summaries of the talks already up on Planet LCA so I shan’t do so again.

The rest of today consists of Miniconfs – one-day streams dedicated to particular topics, organised separately from the main conference. For most of today I attended Open Government, which I found rather dry for the most part although there were quite a few interesting insights I heard. Currently in Haecksen, where Jacinta Richardson has just spoken on the topic of conference presentations, and later my good friend and fellow ANU undergraduate Sam Cheah will be presenting on her beloved Robogals. Great stuff!

Also, I managed to get my hands on a free copy of Perlman’s Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols. Some books were given away in connection with her keynote (as is LCA tradition), and one of the winners decided she was willing to give her copy away to someone else who might want it better. It is thus joining the CSSA Common Room library.