Mozilla Open Source Iasi | Conference Adventures

It all started on a gloomy fall day, last year. The air was warm and I just finished writing a long(ish) email to someone who now has my utmost respect and appreciation. In case you were wondering I’m talking about one of Mozilla’s representatives around here, Andreea.

Andreea is the mastermind behind one of the industries most “underground” events. I kid of course! The event I’m talking about is under the Mozilla flag and it couldn’t have been more well prepared and organized.

I knew she was putting something together, this year, because, well we talked about it and she explained how this event would go. She had lists over lists of stuff that needed to be done. I had my small contribution to the overall organization of the even, of course.

When she finally decided on a date and topic for the event, she asked me if I knew anyone who was willing to speak at this event. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I was also going to speak at this event. Of course, my first choice was my good friend Jakob, who has a long experience in speaking at events.

The date was set for 15 March in the lovely city of Iasi and the topic was open source.
Reservations were made and finally the date came around.

I forgot to mention, the topic of my talk was how can Koding help the Open Source community and the developer community in general.

If you’ve read my previous post about my adventures at a conference you probably know that I’m not very lucky when it comes to getting to a far away place. I was set to depart on the 14th by bus. It was a long 8 hour drive. But in the end I got there in one piece.

Check-in at the hotel? Check! Meet up with the rest of the speakers, including Andreea and Jakob? Check!

After the pre-conference fun was over, the conference day came around. The venue for the whole event was a conference room in one of Iasi’s biggest malls. And thus the stage was set!

The event started and everybody had their goodies to play with. (Thanks Mozilla and XWiki for the goodies!)

The first one on the stage was Jakob. He indulged us with some funny anecdotes and explained why you should develop stuff embracing the open source concept. The audience, still fresh, was captivated by the humours talk.

Up next was Andreea, that showed us ways to get involved in the Mozilla movement. The only thing I can say about the talk is that, I am now a more frequent user of Mozilla, not only because of the talk but because Chrome is stubborn and refuses to work properly.

Sabin and Flavius, had some great talks about 5 star data and WoUSO (World of USO). The latter made me want to actually play the game if it were available for everyone.

A short break and I had the stage. After some technical difficulties with navigation, I managed to keep the talk going. When the demo time came around, I had some more technical difficulties because of the WiFi, but the audience didn’t seem to mind it. The Q&A session was amazing. I had a lot of questions about Koding and the overall vibe of the audience was awesome.

The rest of talks were incredibly interesting and informative with a few worthy mentions.

The Mozilla reps, Alex and Ioana shared some info about the new Firefox OS (I had a chance to play with a Firefox OS powered phone) and about women in open source, well not just in open source but in the programming environment also.
The latter transformed from a talk into a full-fledged debate about women in technical areas. Amazing debate and amazing people with different opinions and ideas!

And thus the end came around. Pictures were made, hands were shaken, hugs were given and everybody left with a big smile on their face.

In order to wrap this up, I would like to thank everyone that joined us on that lovely March day and especially to Andreea, for her guidance and the opportunity of allowing me to speak at the event she put together, Jakob for his guidance, friendship and awesome tech support and my girlfriend for putting up with me in that time frame.

You can find bellow some goodies from the event, including my presentation, some pictures and the website where you can find it all.

Until next time, code long and prosper!

Stefan