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Ohio LinuxFest 2023 Conference Speakers

71 points| transpute | 2 years ago |olfconference.org | reply

26 comments

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[+] mkovach|2 years ago|reply
I use to goto this conference on the regular (even talked at it a few times). To be fair, I knew the people that originally started it.

Always had a great experience. Interesting talks and I have sat down and had conversions with Maddog, Zonker, and a number of other interesting names in Open Source and Linux.

Fun time and great people, wish I had the time this year to visit!

[+] jjice|2 years ago|reply
I've always wanted to go to a conference like this. I've been to the more industrial ones like re:Invent, which are cool, but way less in the way of actually programming and the tech. How does one find events like this near them? I'm in New England, so I assume Boston would be the spot but I have no idea where to look. What sites do people use for this? Or should I even consider taking time off of work and traveling to some of these if they're further?

I'd love to hear about other's experiences with conferences like these. They seem wonderful.

[+] ecliptik|2 years ago|reply
They were a lot more popular in the 90s and early aughts when Linux was still new and people were looking for community. I usually would find out about them through local Linux User Groups (LUGs) at the time [1].

I remember a Linuxfest in 2002 in Southern Ohio (not OLF) and John "Maddog" Hall was also a keynote speaker. Looking at his speaking schedule is probably a good way to find similar events. My most distinct memory of it was someone had a table of NeXT computers setup to use.

Along with OLF, SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo) [2] is another large Linuxfest type event. Much more of a technical and casual vibe, and satisfies personally instead if professionally. I did a GPG key signing party at it once and it was a nerdy and fun as it sounds.

1. https://wiki.ohiolinux.org/index.php/History

2. https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x

[+] bkallus|2 years ago|reply
I'm also in the New England area. In Boston, there's LibrePlanet, which is in March. I went for the first time this year; it was a lot of fun.

I'm still trying to figure out if I'll fly out to Columbus for OLF this year. I went last year and the year before. It's worth the travel to me, but I have a flexible schedule. The talks are good, but the people are the real reason to go. A lot of the people who go to these conferences work on really interesting stuff. There are of course also big names like maddog and Doug McIlroy.

[+] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
Probably more Meetups than larger and more formally-organized volunteer-events. As the sibling notes, there used to be more along those lines in the Boston area in the late 80s/90s but a lot of the more grassroots type of conferences have tended to fade out over time. (And I suspect COVID--and tightening of tech budgets--killed some more that were holding out mostly on the basis of momentum.)

DevOps Days is still around and there's a Boston one this year although I haven't been to one of those for a few years.

[+] ecshafer|2 years ago|reply
Philadelphia holds fosscon every year. Also a cheap conference, laid back, non corporate
[+] orblivion|2 years ago|reply
I think the first time I ever heard of the nerdcore hip hop group Dual Core was their performance at this fest ~15 years ago.
[+] whalesalad|2 years ago|reply
I try to avoid traveling south into Ohio but this might make it worthwhile.
[+] dang|2 years ago|reply
Please don't post regional putdowns to HN, regardless of what region you have a problem with. It leads to generic tangents and they usually turn nasty.

I know it's possible to read this as a sort of good-natured ribbing or neighborly rivalry but those subtleties don't survive on a large public internet forum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html