Conference

On Tuesday I attended the Open Source Strategy Forum in London, which is a meeting of the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FinOS), part of the Linux Foundation. (There is a New York version coming up in November for those across the pond.) The morning keynotes included Gabriele Columbro introducing the day, then Russell Green highlighting the progress FinOS has made; Liz Rice of CNCF fame with an inspiring talk about contributing back to upstream; an interesting conversation between Nick Cook and Jane Gavronsky about innovations in financial regulation, and finally a presentation from Andrew Agerbak of BCG about how open source can help banks move to public cloud. (I disagreed with some of Andrew’s presentation; I would weight the regulatory requirements more strongly, but agree with the point that open source can help with cloud portability.) ...

Yesterday, I was at the first ever PostgreSQL UK conference, in Birmingham. The venue was familiar from various events last year, such as GUADEC and PyCon UK - the Conservatoire is becoming quite established as a relatively cheap, central UK venue for technical events. I gave a talk about monitoring PostgreSQL databases on behalf of credativ. (Slides for all the talks are available on the PostgreSQL wiki.) I got a reasonable level of comments and feedback afterwards, and perhaps those will help with the development of some better monitoring solutions. The act of preparing the talk also let me discover a few different monitoring tools that look useful - perhaps I'll get the chance to look at them at some point. ...

My conference tradition is to occupy myself with activities completely unrelated to the main topic. For instance, at DebConf I hacked on GNOME stuff, at GUADEC I hacked on Debian stuff, and at LinuxConf.eu I did very little. At PyCon UK, I've built the wireless-dev tree of Linux, and got the new b43 driver to run. So, it works. It appears to have increased the transmission power of the card, and limits the bit rate properly, so should work at longer ranges without fiddling about. Having said that, I've been using it all of five minutes, so all kinds of bugs could be lurking around the corner. ...