PICC'12 a Great Learning experience

This past weekend (May 11-12, 2012) was the PICC'12 conference. It was a great conference. I can't thanks people enough for the work they did. Although I had the grand title of Chairmen the real work is done by all the volunteers. So I again want all the kudos to go to them.

 

I'll hang my hat on the USB pens idea and maybe I pushed the BoFs but the process was a long one over months of emails and conference calls but the end result was a success. 127 attendees and from the early comments we may exceed that next year and with Adam at the helm I think that number will grow and we will have another great PICC (oops! I mean —LOPSA-East sounds good).

besides learning new things I like the conferences just to meet people and to put a face to a name from an email list. At $Work I don't get out much except to other parts of our business so being at PICC I got to see people I met at previous ones and also new ones. It is great to have people come up and introduce themselves and start to talk on a topic from the list. Or to continue discussing a session we just left.

I attended the edu BoF and just wish there was more time. I think we are always asking for more time. Although I didn't like getitng ejected from the room but the reason was a good one, another BoF needed the space. So it bolstered we made the right decision to have them.

I really enjoyed jesse trucks session on security. Classes on security a good but frightening at the same time. As you sit there and listen to Best practices, should do, and should haves you start to think about your own systems and then you feel a chill as you wonder "Is that instanced patched correctly?" But it is neccesary to sit through this so you can come back and have a basis to lean on to get your own stuff buttoned up correctly.

The other new thing this year was cfengine. Part way through Alexsey's class it dawnd on me that cfengine is similar to my Big Brother installation except one with a bit more authority. I can see us moving to that here to handle a lot of things. With our dwindling support at our High Schools cfengine could be a life saver for the person left handling all of them (hopefully it isn't me).

Now to take a break and wait for the process to start for next year's conference. May 3-4 2013 isn't that far away.