POSSCON Experiences

It's been a few days since I attended POSSCON and I have had some time to think my experience over.  POSSCON started off with a bang for me.  Some sort of clerical error allowed me to be a CEO for the day.  Here is my POSSCON name tag.

 









One of the sponsors of the event was "Strickland Law Firm" and they even had a booth in the exhibition area.  So, I think that someone made a dangerous assumption based off of my last name.

But on to the juicy stuff, POSSCON began with a session where all of the attendees gathered in the main auditorium and listened to a couple speakers.  The most interesting talk during this joint session came from a Microsoft representative.  I was baffled when I saw that someone from Microsoft was even at this OPEN SOURCE conference.  His talk centered on the claim that "Microsoft has changed and has become more open".  Some may be hesitant to believe such a claim.  One such person would be John "Maddog" Hall who gave a speech on "The hidden costs of closed source software".  He poked fun at the Microsoft representative's claims and I thought that his talk was the most entertaining.

Our assignment for this conference was to speak to three of the speakers.  I figured that the most opportune time to speak with someone would be....of course... during lunch.  I looked around the lunch room and spotted no one that I recognized so I sat at a random table with some empty seats.  Well, I ended up sitting with a couple of pretty interesting people including Lonnie Emard - the executive director at Consortium for Enterprise Systems Management and a couple of people from ibss.

As I ate, I listened in on what one of the guys from IBSS was talking about.  He (Christopher Smith) was discussing how they needed to find some junior level people (as well as interns I think)  to bring on to their current Android development project.  This spiked my attention, as I have a strong interest in mobile dev.  As he continued to discuss this, one of his colleagues turned to me and Josh (Walton) and started making small chat.  I eventually mentioned to her that her colleague should be looking at the people at his table if he was looking for junior level developers.  She responded that she would introduce me to him once he had a second.

So,  this led to a discussion between Chris and myself on what he was looking for, information on his project as well as my experience with Android and the work I've been doing at SPARC.  We ended up exchanging information - by scanning the bar codes on our name tags using our phones.  We are currently communicating about a possible job opportunity.

I met one other interesting person at the conference.  Kathy Meis has a start up called Serendipite Studios in Charleston and is currently looking for interns and junior developers.  The description of her business -taken from her business card- reads "artisan-quality eTools for readers, writers and content nerds".  Her email is kameis@comcast.net if anyone is interested in learning more.  Apparently, and I just learned this after looking up her LinkedIn, she was at one point a Senior Editor at Forbes inc.

So, It's pretty neat who you get to meet at these sorts of events.