Red Hat Summit 2013

I attended my first ever Red Hat Summit last week and got the opportunity to present as well. I also got the chance to meet my team in here after interacting with them for almost an year now.

The summit got kick started with on 11th June with Jim’s keynote. Jim came on the stage wearing  jeans. How cool is that !!!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abTSM8hvkb8]

Two take aways for me from his keynote were:-
1. Connect …
This was the theme of the summit this year. Connect with different engineers, vendors, community to write better code,  create a eco-system which can benefit all the participants.

2. Technology choice = Innovation choice.

In this era all the innovations are happening in open way. Open innovations allows users to participate in the technology innovations. This can not happen in closed way. And the technology choice made by the companies, vendors now would lay down the innovations in coming years.

I came to know that on 12th there is 5K marathon scheduled for Summit attendees  to honor those who affected by the tragic events at the 2013 running of the Boston Marathon.  The venue for the Summit was on the very same to street. So, I decided to participate on that and did it. It was great fun.

 Later in day I attended Paul Cormier keynote, which was was mostly focused on  Open Hybrid Cloud. After that I attended few talks and posted my visualization project about collecting the performance stats from different Gluster nodes upstream forge.gluster.org. 

My talk was scheduled on 13th June at 4:50 – 5:50 PM. After attending the Brian Steven’s keynote   I mostly worked my presentation. I gave the talk with Ben and I think it went very well.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiQRwOtmunk]

After my talk Performance team went for the group party. During that I got to hear that how well I got mixed with the team, as it was like I have always been working from here. Sometime working completely remotely from the team can be very challenging. I was happy to hear that.

Before leaving for the company party I met our CEO Jim Whitehurst.  The company party which was sponsored by IBM. A band from Montreal Alter Ego performed there. They were awesome, everyone was on their feet.

After the company party we went for Pub Crawling, in which we have to go six different pubs and drink. I was with few of my team members and some other very senior guys. We managed to cover 3 pubs. Last pub was very live. I met our CTO, Brian Stevens there and chatted with him. It was 2 AM when I returned back to the room.

Last day of Summit just had few sessions in the morning. Most of attendees either with had hangover from last night or have gone. The attendance was very low.  After all the sessions got over I went for group lunch with Red Hat Storage group.

Overall it was a great experience. I got meet so many great people. I hope to participate in more such events.