Friday afternoon was OSSAT at the the Microsoft Reactor. I had the pleasure of hosting it with the main organizer, Justin Johnson (@elof) from Keen.io. I met Justin at last year’s Open Source Show And Tell when he reached out to the .NET team and I came to speak about .NET open source. I was so impressed with the meetup, that I coaxed Justin to do it at the Reactor this time.
It was a ton of fun and a really good crowd. We had folks from GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Node.js Foundation, Heroku alumni and many more interesting people that came and discussed a variety of open source topics. We had four 20 minute keynotes and a bunch of 5 minute lightning talks people signed up for on the fly. I have to say, I really like this format because it gives everyone a chance to have a voice and share something in our open source world. And the Reactor space was perfect.
Kicking off #OSSAT@MSFTReactor. Excited to explore OSS for the afternoon! pic.twitter.com/j8KSlx8VRd
— Keen IO (@keen_io) April 22, 2016
Whoa, the @Microsoft reactor space is way cooler than I knew #OSSAT
— Tristan Sokol (@tristansokol) April 22, 2016
Our four keynote speakers were great. First up, Mathias wowed us with the power of F#, .NET and Visual Studio Code.
Great intro to #fsharp at #OSSAT here @MSFTReactor from @brandewinderpic.twitter.com/1o9shxw6Md
— Beth Massi (@BethMassi) April 22, 2016
Tons of fun live coding F# at @MSFTReactor + @keen_io#OSSAT– thx @k_cieslak for the awesome work on @code + @IonideProject :) #fsharp
— Mathias Brandewinder (@brandewinder) April 22, 2016
Then we got some great education on the world and research of Unikernel systems from Ian Eyeberg.
Unikernels. So hot right now. #OSSAT@datawireiopic.twitter.com/wJse2PZTps
— ✏Austin W. Gunter (@austingunter) April 22, 2016
Then Francesc got up and gave us a history lesson on open source including how it was done with the first Xerox printer(!) and spoke to how open source has benefitted Google. Nadia had some interesting observations on GitHub repos and gave us some tips and tricks on writing contribution guidelines and running successful, inclusive, open source projects.
.@nayafia‘s contribution template looks kick ass: https://t.co/KXtXfG7FEa It deserves all your ⭐️⭐️⭐️. #OSSAT
— Taylor Barnett (@taylor_atx) April 22, 2016
There were also a bunch of interesting lightning talks and great questions and discussions from the crowd, particularly on open source SLAs, open business models, open voting systems, open education, contributing to documentation and parsing SQL. A bunch of us also went out for beers afterwards where the real networking happened ;-). We did record the talks, we just have to get through the footage and post it somewhere. I’ll update this post when we get it all together.
I want to thank Justin for organizing this fantastic meetup. As a like minded community person, it was an honor helping out this time. If you’re looking to host your own OSSAT, check out Justin’s playbook: http://opensourceshowandtell.github.io/
Enjoy!