We’ve had talks by Ohad Levy on The Foreman, Brice Figureau on StoreConfigs, Paul Nasrat on Facter, and James Turnbull on developing Puppet.  After the talks yesterday, we split up into self-organized sessions, which are always my favorite — everyone’s far more involved, and you know just about everyone is getting something from every session.

The conference has been successful enough that I’m confident we’ll have more of them.  Next time, though, we’ll skip the catering and spend the extra money on getting a location closer to the city center.

First I’m on a configuration management panel run by James Turnbull at the Open Source Bridge in Portland, OR.  I haven’t been on a multiple-tool panel in a while, so this should be interesting.  I’m also excited to be back in Portland – I absolutely love the town, so much that I’m moving back there this summer.  And for those non-Americans who think we don’t make great beer:  Get thyself to Portland, and see how wrong you are.  I should also be running a Puppet BoF there.

From there I fly down to San Jose to give a workshop on Puppet at the O’Reilly Velocity conference.  This is its second year, and while it claims to have a web operations/performance focus, I think it stands to quickly become the best general operations conference around.  LISA is too academic and just moves too slowly, and there isn’t a whole lot of other competition.

Last year’s was great, and this year’s is a day longer and looks to be even better.

Finally, the day after Velocity, I attend Om Malik’s Structure.  This conference is more focused on operations executives, which is a very different focus for me, but I met a lot of interesting and knowledgeable people there last year, including some from completely outside the technology space.  I normally diss executive events, but this one seems to stand out.

Hopefully you’ll have a chance to track me down at one of these events.