OpenStack Day - Budapest, 6th June 2016

It was the 4th OSD in Budapest, but at a brand new place, which was absolutely brilliant. And by brilliant I mean - nice place to stay, great location, enough options around, very good sound, well working AC in rooms for talks and professional catering. I am not sure about number of attendees, but it was pretty big and crowded - so awesome! I really can say that it was awesome experience for me (please accept my apology for using word “awesome” too often here). I brought 2 banners - RDO + OpenStack, RDO stickers, TripleO stickers with the Owl, RDO/CentOS beermats, cheat-sheets, leaflets and few t-shirts. It was only RH booth at the beginning, but I changed it a bit into RDO by adding those promo stuff. It was distributed very well. The problem of this OSD is (and I was warned in advance by Ondrej Marek) that there are mostly Hungarian people, who are not very open to have some discussion or ask many questions. I was at a booth between talks anyway. Also I joined many talks, had a nice discussion with Marketing guys on the booth and meet also one RH Sales guy Miroslaw Pawlowski (from PL).

It was very nice, very well organised OSD. Lovely food, lovely place, great people, nice talks, it was a bit more quiet than on FOSDEM or Devconf.cz. But that is probably something related to the nationality, as Ondrej mentioned.

Hugh Brock from our team had a great TripleO talk, received some questions after a talk. It was very nice talk with cool jokes.

OpenStack Day - Prague, 8th June 2016

This event was 1st OpenStack Day in Prague. According to that I was really surprised how well organised and placed it was. For this event we were at DOX gallery, which is very modern, beautiful and quiet and also at a perfect distance from bus station. So we had a lot of space to go around, have a coffee, conversation or a good meal. At the entrance some OpenStack swag was distributed - OS sticker, super cool OpenStack glasses, some info leaflets and map of the area, also awesome bag saying “OpenStack Prague” which I now use for shopping and feel so cool now. Attendance was pretty large, we really filled that area with attendees. I meet there Zdenka Van Der Zwan and Ondrej Marek, that was just great to meet them in person. Also many people which I met in Budapest. I provided to Ondrej the info about OSD in Budapest and also we had a chance to discuss the swag, or what could I do to motivate people to attend a bit more, and also we agreed to be in touch to see in advance some more possibilities for future events.

I met also Jirka Kolář from TCP Cloud and also Aleš from Elostech and few other guys I know from local community. Ondrej confirmed that the community meetups are a bit silent, still but again - let’s see how it will go.

We had there a beautiful Red Hat booth, with fancy RH promo stuff - free to take. Also you could win a quadricopter (if you were not a RH employee of course) by filling up a survey. I brought some RDO things, to refresh the RH booth. I took RDO banner, OpenStack banner, RDO stickers, beermats (super successful), cheat-sheets, TripleO stickers. I have great muscles now :D thanks to carrying heavy backpack and two banners, lol.

Angus Thomas had a talk (the same that Hugh Brock had in Budapest OpenStack day) and we also had a chance to chat a bit and enjoy a lunch together. It was very nice. Hugh couldn’t attend this OSD due to Dublin management meeting. It is a shame that not many people from our team were present at this Day. I met some technical writers (Radek Bíba, and his colleague whose name I forgot), Angus, few guys from Marketing. There was no one from HR - Tyler Golden couldn’t attend. I met many familiar faces from Budapest there, but from our teams there was only me and Angus and Flavio Percoco, who traveled from Italy. I hope that next year there will be more attendance from our local team members.

For a next OSD in Praha, I will advertise it much better. My vision is to travel there as a team and maybe have some nice dinner together? Let’s see. But for a next time I would definitely ask people directly myself.