Libcloud at ApacheCon NA, 2014 in Denver, Colorado

This is just a quick heads up that I will be attending ApacheCon North America, 2014 in Denver, Colorado next month.

I will be giving two talks. First one is titled 5 years of Libcloud. This is retrospective talk where I will tell a story of how Libcloud grew from a small project originally developed for the needs of Cloudkick product into a fully fledged and relatively popular Apache project.

I will go into details on some of the challenges we faced, what we learned from them and how we grew the community and the project.

Second one is titled Reducing barriers to contribution to an Apache project.

To give you some context, I first need to say that I’m a person who loves to move fast and loves lean and efficient approaches and teams. On top of that, I also have zero tolerance for unnecessary / useless processes and deep and mostly useless hierarchies.

All of that means I don’t see myself a big company person, where having useless processes, which among many other things, slow innovation down is usually the norm.

Apache is a relatively big organization which means it has it’s own fair share of (useless) proceses. A lot of “new era” developers who grew up with Github also consider Apache as slow, inflexible and place where projects go to die1.

In this talk I will go into details why this is not totally true and how Apache is (slowly) becoming more flexible and changing to adopt those new work-flows.

On top of that, I will also give some examples on how you can adopt those new work-flows, iterate fast and still receive all the benefits from being an Apache project. Those examples will be taken directly from the things we have learned at the Apache Libcloud project.

Depending on how many people will attend the talk, I think it would also be very interesting to turn this into a panel where other people can contribute their ideas and we can discuss how to reduce barriers even further and make Apache more attractive for “new-era projects”.

Besides my talks, Sebastien Goasguen, a long time contributor to the project who has recently joined the PMC is also giving a talk titled Apache Libcloud.

If you are around, you should stop by to listen to those talks and contribute your ideas to my second talk.

  1. Citation needed. I’m kinda lazy and tired atm, but you can Google it up. ↩