by This is the fourth and final installment in a four-part series covering my experiences at SA Days Phoenix; you can also read parts one, two, and three.
Sorry this last installment is so late; Tuesday was a late night, and yesterday was a long flight.
Anywho. Tuesday afternoon was a class on writing IT policies, starring David Parter as the guy who talked and Moose “Esther” Filderman as the woman who ran the slideshow. It was a killer session, my favorite of the Days. I’m in a small enough shop that, if we want policies, we have to lead the push and, often, write them ourselves, so this was extra applicable to me. If you get a chance to take this class anywhere else — a future SA Days, other conferences, the hard drive you stole from Parter — do it. Do it.
After that, it was off to a mediocre Mexican place, lots of beer, election results, and Give Me the Brain!
General reactions to the first ever SA Days:
It went amazingly well for the first time. It’s glaringly obvious how much work the planners put into this to make it go smoothly. Huge, massive kudos to them.
I’ll reiterate that I really liked the local flavor (or, at times, flava). It’s a great way to reach out to the SAs who can’t afford to get to LISA — they need training and LOPSA, too, after all.
The hotel was perfect: it was cheap, with nice amenities, no cockroaches, and big enough to have two pools but small enough that we had a major presence there. And free (wired) Internet in the rooms rawked hard.
Suggestions for the future:
Open call for presenters. I’m sure Jesse “Teaching All Four Sessions” Trucks would agree with me. This should start with the local LOPSA/LUG/other SA groups, though, to preserve the localness. We don’t want the usual suspects teaching at a bunch of cookie-cutter SA Days.
Maybe — maybe — more downtime between day and night activies. Monday, when we had two training sessions, invited talks, dinner from Google, and BoFs all in a row, we were doing SA Days stuff from 9 am to 10 pm. That was a little much. On the other hand, more natives are likely to leave if you have an hour or more of downtime, and this was a problem as it was: the BoFs didn’t really happen. And a lot of people leave Tuesday afternoon, so you can’t really spread the stuff out over two days. This is a conundrum.
More wireless coverage at the conference itself. I found that I could only get wireless in the conference rooms themselves, and, due to this, snack breaks tended to consist of people sprinting into the hallway, grabbing a handful of pretzels and a caffeine-laden beverage, and sprinting back to the warm glow of the LCD monitor. I think that hurt the hallway track — it was largely the veteran LOPSAns partaking in it, which detracts from the local element. It also tends to marginalize the newbies, making them less likely to join.
Well, that’s the news from Lake Lopsagon, where all the men are bearded, all the women are Moose and Pat, and all the children are poor, misled creatures who should really be considering a career in anything but system administration.