On September 19th and 20th I attended the OSS4B conference, and held the talk “a big project starts with a small plan” (the slides are available on SpeakerDeck). While I was at it, I also held the five-minute lightning talk “the value of personal configuration management”, about why using configuration management on your own machines may be a good idea (especially if you do that with CFEngine 🙂 the slides of the lightning talk are also on SpeakerDeck).

I left Oslo exhausted by the effort of the preparations (I had posted my proposal quite late, and my talk was confirmed only 45 days before the conference), and I was quite nervous for two main reasons; the first: well, it was my first international conference! and the second: Gene Kim, one of the two keynote speakers, was scheduled to hold a talk in parallel with mine. The trip from Oslo to Prato was quite a long one, and didn’t help make me feel more relaxed.

But things went quite smooth. The organizers were really welcoming and helpful, and a friendly atmosphere sprung immediately among the speakers. It made me smile to see a CFEngine junkie (me) sitting side by side with a Puppet junkie (Alessandro Franceschi) and a Chef hippie (Chris McClimans) and discussing without prejudice of the good and bad sides of their respective favorite toys, and about the advantages of configuration management in general. Not to mention the nice chats with the rest of the gang of badasses that was scheduled to talk at the conference.  By the way, if you want to get a taste of how good the OSS4B speakers are, you can do it anytime and as long as you want via the OSS4B-2013 list I set up on twitter.

And my talk… well, I expected that everyone would go to Gene’s speech, but I actually managed to have a dozen or so spectators! I had fun giving my speech; I hope they had, too, and that (at least some of -) them found the talk interesting.

All in all, it was a nice “first time”, and a great opportunity to listen to experienced people, get interesting inputs, and discuss nice ideas. I’d like to express my thanks Barbara, Gabriele and Harald, and the whole organizing team through them: you did a great job, I look forward to see what next year’s edition will be!

I didn’t take many photos, and those taken with my phone are horrible quality, but I hope you’ll enjoy them.