Big day for me on Tuesday with the Sysadmin Miniconf happening. We (
Ewen, Andrew and myself) and the other Miniconf people all had to be in
at 8am to setup for out Miniconfs. It turned out this was a good idea
since the controls in our room were not working and one of the
University techies had to fix it remotely, the MySQL people had to move
completely when there room’s equipment didn’t work at all.
After we started our room filled right up, past overflowing so we ended
up swapping with MySQL and moving into the big theatre in the block. I
think we had close to 150 people at most talks so a big success.
Apart from a couple of small glitches (mainly with the sound) and the
printed programme being out of date the day went pretty good. Ewen and
Andrew kept things ticking over and I mostly avoided getting too
stressed, collecting slide copies and actually listening to the odd
talk.
I think the one I liked best was Lindsay Holmwood’s puppet based one in
the early sessions. It was very well presented ( Lissig style with lots
of simple slides) and the content was great. The slides from all the
talks along with video should be available on the web very soon.
The rest of the talks were all good as well, feedback from others was
pretty positive and I think I’ll definitely try and do it again next
year. Due to time constraints the maximum talk length was just 25 minutes
but keeping to this meant we got a lot more talks into the day although I
would have liked more depth sometimes.
After the end of the Miniconf I went to the Speaker’s dinner. I wasn’t
actually speaking at the conference but Miniconf organisers got invited
along too which was really cool.
The venue was nice and I got to talk to some interesting people who I
hopefully didn’t bore too much
