openSUSE conference 2019 aftermath

Event: openSUSE conference
Date: May 24 - 26, 2019
Place: Z-Bau
City: Nürnberg

All the info you need to know. It's the place to be if you're openSUSE contributor. This year the conference took place right after openSUSE Leap 15.1 release. So it means a good reason to party.

Let's start from scratch.
I was so excited for the conference. My friends are jealous of me traveling a lot. The fun is not traveling but meeting friends after a year. Friends that I read their blogs, read e-mails or even sometimes (when I understand) their tech contribution to openSUSE.

A long wait to airports and flights and most of all ALONE. That's the hard part. I have to walk around airports, check my phone, go to stores. But more or less, the time passes and I'm ready for the flight.

After a long ride, I arrived at Nuremberg. It's the second time I visit this historical city. I had free time before I meet my friends, so I had lunch and a coffee near the rail station.

First day started at 9.30 with the first keynote YaST – Yet another SUSE Talk? by Thomas Di Giacomo.

After keynote we had to register. This year we had to choose between a backpack or t-shirt. Logistically speaking, a backpack is the best solution for everyone. I mean the project doesn't have spend a fortune to print all T-shirt sizes (for men and women). I'm not sure but maybe next year we stick only on backpacks.

GNOME sent one of the event boxes to support the conference. Unfortunately the box didn't have enough T-shirts and stickers. Lizards came by the booth and bought some T-shirts, took stickers (not only GNOME ones but I managed to have from other projects) and of course I promoted GUADEC.

I was lucky to be at Dr Luis Falcon's presentation: Building large health networks GNU Health Federation and openSUSE. Not sure but I'm obsessed with the GNU Health project and I'm very grateful that openSUSE supports it.

Another presentation that I was prepared to see was openSUSE on ARM by Guillaume Gardet because I'm excited about the ARM technology. Maybe I'm one of the first guys that bought Raspberry Pi in Greece.

Two presentations, not that technical for me, were The Art of Advocacy with Linux by my friend Redon Skikuli and of course What can you do with a self-hosted alternative to Office365, Google Apps and others by my friend Frank Karlitschek. Sorry Frank, I joined Redon to take some pictures. I saw yours on youtube.

The final presentation wasn't exactly presentation but it was the Annual Discussion with openSUSE Board. It was interesting to see opinions about legal structure (foundation).

At the end of the second day (Saturday), we had barbecue and SUSE band rocked for us. It was the release party, remember?

I met a lot of friends there. Some of them I read them on e-mails. Some of them came from far away (Mauritius, Taiwan, Indonesia, India). So the conference is the chance to meet everyone once a year. As we say: Have a lot of fun.

My trip ended little bit badly because the flight from Nuremberg to Munich was canceled and I had to go to the airport and check my options. They booked me another set of flights and I reached Thessaloniki 3 hours later than my initial flight.

Soon enough I will have a video ready from my trip. Please bare with me. I'll change this post with the video.

Until then, don't miss the video, so press the button to subscribe.:

To end this post, I would like to thank openSUSE, that sponsored my trip.