[geeklog-devel] FrOSCon 2009

[Dirk Haun]

So in case you missed the announcement[1]: Geeklog had a booth again at
FrOSCon last weekend.

As usual, the conference was really well organized and the staff was
helpful and quick to solve any smaller or bigger issues that came up.
They even provided us with an LCD for our booth (a big thanks for that).

(Btw, is anyone aware of something like a ruggedized LCD? When
travelling by train, I can't really carry an LCD around, but may be able
to put a 14 or 15 inch modell into my trolley)

Back to the conference: Markus Wollschläger[2] helped out on Saturday
(thanks!) so that I was able to leave the booth for a while and even
attend a presentation (by Sebastian Bergmann, about PHP testing
tools[5]). The Geeklog booth (more like a corner, actually) was located
in a separate new room. We (and the other exhibitors there) did seem to
get a little less traffic there than we had last year, when we were
located in the main alley (to the lecture rooms). On the plus side,
things were less cramped in that new space.

Let's see what I can remember from our visitors: The (upcoming) Postgres
support was well received. One person even went ahead and checked out
Stan's repository (and came back the next day to report that it didn't
work for him - we're still in contact trying to figure out what went wrong).

"What is Geeklog?" was still the predominant first question. Trying to
position it against the "competition" still wasn't easy (quick: What's
the unique feature in Geeklog over other CMS?). I usually went with the
security aspect and the permissions system.

We got some insights into typical use cases[3], for which we could
usually provide an answer (Markus' experience in helping less tech-savvy
people run a website with Geeklog helped a lot here).

I had a surprise guest on Sunday: A guy in a Drupal shirt who didn't
introduce himself and wasn't wearing a name tag either. He mentioned
that he had watched Geeklog years ago, then lost sight of it and was now
happy to hear it was still around. Only when he started a sentence with
"Back when I founded Drupal ..." did I realize who I was talking to ;-)
Nice guy. He gave the keynote[4] on Sunday which I couldn't attend. I'll
have to watch the video (once the server reappears - seems to be down
right now).

What else? Slightly offtopic, but I got my employer into sponsoring the
conference bags and got a kick out of seeing all these people wandering
around with the company logo all weekend.

I also gave a presentation again this year - in the last slot on the
last day. While many of the exhibitors were already packing up,
something like 20-30 people still came to see it, which is pretty good I
think. The presentation was about testing in open source projects and
given that I only finished it at the last minute, it was probably okay.
The announcement was a bit too broad though, as someone pointed out
afterwards. I was looking at it too much from a developer's point of
view and only glossed over some of the organisational issues. Room for
improvement for a future incarnation. Someone pointed me to [6], which
looks like a useful resource for finding open source testing tools.

I'm pretty sure that I'll be at FrOSCon again in 2010. As a visitor at
the very least - other roles (exhibitor, speaker) to be decided in time :)

bye, Dirk

[1] <http://www.geeklog.net/article.php/geeklog-froscon-2009>
[2] <http://www.flickr.com/photos/sneaky-pie/3844906931/>
[3] <http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/view.php?id=811#bugnotes>
[4] <http://programm.froscon.org/2009/events/428.en.html>
[5] <http://sebastian-bergmann.de/archives/856-Quality-Assurance-Tools-
for-PHP.html>
[6] <http://www.opensourcetesting.org/>


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