Monday, July 20, 2015

OSCON 2015 Begins!

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This time I had my confirmation code, after the embarrassment of last year where a phone call needed to be placed to confirm my status as a proposal reader.  On top of that I'm an employee.  Anyway, this year the confirmation code was not required, simply a QR-code on one's phone, or the email address one had registered with.  Super fast, with the name badge printing right there.  I was good to go in no time flat.

Holden is in from the UK and we met up with Patrick and Deke at Hop House last night.  Today, he and I were both in the Docker tutorial, brilliantly presented and organized by Andrew Baker, with Twilio in DC.  He had a large number of Ubuntu cloud instances ready to give us each one-on-one access to a docker-ready platform.

So what's Docker?  As Andrew explained, on the spectrum from manually configuring a server from scratch, all the way to configuration scripts and virtual machines, it's closer to supplying a VM but not in the sense of hosting a guest Operating System.  Might one call it a light-weight operating system layer, an OS extension?

Docker containerizes processes (services) and thereby has them join a community of well-behaved players, and in a way that stores to an image one places in a Docker Registry.  Run an image to boot up containers, each supervising a processes such as a Flask app, PostgreSQL, Nginx, Neo4j, and so on.

I met up with Alex Martelli then rejoined Steve and we shortly adjourned to lunch, in the vast "Holodeck" as some call it, in the Oregon Convention Center, there to be joined by Anna Ravenscroft (also Martelli family).  Conversation turned to having enough supplies to last through some unspecified catastrophe, a focus of LDS church members as well as preparedness groups more generally.

I got through the gifify exercise then decided I wanted my XQ-1 back from Camera World.  I was able to secure the replacement and return before the tutorial had ended, whereupon we splice to the above lunch at the Pythonista table.  This is actually a replacement, not a repair (same language used in cardiology) with a new serial number and everything.  I'm looking forward to blissing out with it.  Above is the first shot taken, of Holden on my back deck, after lunch.


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