Observations about Apache Con NA 2016

This year Apache Con NA was held in Vancouver BC.

As usual, being at Apache Con gives a chance to talk to your fellow Open Source developers and this year it was as great as ever - meeting my old and new Talend colleagues, talking to those I already have met before and getting to know other people attending the conference was nice. 
The conference hotel was few hundred meters away from the waterfront where one could walk or run to a green Stanley Park:

Now let me talk about the actual conference. Big Data and Core conference are no longer run at the same time, with a single day intersection only. I guess I was preferring a more compact 'mix-in' format as I could attend to either BigData or Core presentations in a fewer number of days. But organizing a successful conference is very difficult - in the end of the day whatever format works best for Apache Con is the winning format.

I did like and learn something new from all the keynotes I listened to but I particularly enjoyed an Open Source is a Positive Sum Game by Sam Ramji. Have you ever  looked at the schedule, not sure what to expect from the listed talks, and then someone starts speaking and you realize you are listening to a visionary ?  This is what I felt when listening to Sam.

A number of other talks were interesting. My colleague JB's presentations were both interesting and entertaining, and I was also happy to see Hadrian and Jamie, both my former colleagues :-), co-presenting. 

I think Colm and myself had a good audience during our presentation. It must've been difficult for those who attended to listen to a lot of security related information presented on Friday after lunch :-) and we are grateful to all who were there. I did overrun by 1 minute though and we had no chance to talk to the audience afterwards but we did convey a lot of information during our talk.

And then finally we had the last few presentations to choose from and we made it to a Shawn McKinney's presentation. Now imagine it is 16.00, late Friday afternoon, and you are about to listen to yet another security related talk :-). I think Shawn did remarkably well. Shawn's down to earth, likeable presentation style made the real difference. And while I did learn few things about Role Based Access Control (such as the temporal restrictions), what really did get to me were Shawn's advices to "test and re-use".  You may say it is all quite obvious but sometimes one can get lax on either of those fundamentals, myself including. I'd like to talk about some of the thoughts I've had about the 're-use vs implement yourself' later on.

It was great to be there :-)