SCALE 5X a Hit!

I spent the last weekend supporting two booths at the fifth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 5X)! This was the best ever and I never even got to leave my booth. Normally, I attend as an "attendee" and just mix around, go to the various talks, etc. But, given that I'm the manager of technical recruiting for Ticketmaster, I had a duty to perform so I sat in my booth along with my teammates. While that doesn't sound very exciting, I really did enjoy myself. I find that the people who attend SCALE are just plain interesting. SCALE draws from a mixed crowd of open-source engineers, linux sysadmins, networking people, and your all-around technology hobbiest. Basically, it's a great bunch of people.

The grass-roots nature of this event is fostered in part by their ready support of local user groups. The people at SCALE will give a full booth space to local user groups who are willing to do a demonstration. This year I'm running the Los Angeles Perl Mongers (la.pm) so we decided to pull together a booth and demo. The people at SCALE were nice enough to put the booth directly across from my Ticketmaster booth so I could keep an eye on things. Actually, I ended up not needing to because the volunteers at the la.pm help up their end and kept that booth staffed and eager to answer questions (Thanks Juan, Nimish, Randall, Pablo, Rene, and Ateeq!).

Overall, SCALE is a wonderful event. It proved to be a great place for my organization to tell our story (global operations, commitment to open-source technologies, and a heavy emphasis on linux). The la.pm's booth was swamped by people interested in learning more about the organization, the monthly technical talks, etc. If you're in town next year during February, plan on going, it's a great weekend.