Upcoming travel
In the next few weeks, I'm going to be travelling around a bit: two conferences, followed by a bit of touristing in Europe before I return home. Aside from the hours when I'm on planes, I'll still be connected to the world — I plan on buying local prepaid SIM cards for my phone and tethering my laptop — but I may be slower than usual replying to emails. On the other hand, my travels may take me in closer proximity to people; and I'd be very happy to meet people along the way.My first stop is in Las Vegas for AWS re:invent, on November 27th-30th (the event is the 27th through the 29th, but I'm sticking around for another day before flying out). When I first saw this announced, I was skeptical: It seems far too much "manager-oriented" and nowhere near "developer-ish" enough to be useful (of course, my bar for comparison is BSDCan, which is a phenomenal conference for us technical types). I'm still somewhat skeptical, given that a lot of the talks seem — based on the abstracts on the website — to fall into the category of "stuff you would know if you read the AWS documentation"; but the list of speakers makes me optimistic that there will be interesting things to learn... if not in the official talks, at least in the "hallway track". Another reason for attending is my work on getting FreeBSD into EC2: I've love to meet people who are using, or are considering using, FreeBSD on EC2, and I figure a conference with 5000 AWS users can't be a bad place to look. If you're going to be at re:invent and you're interested in FreeBSD, let me know!
My second stop is in Oslo for Passwords^12 on December 3rd-5th. There I'll be speaking about the scrypt key derivation function; the conference talk in 2009 when I released scrypt was aimed at a fairly general developer audience, so I'm looking forward to presenting it to a more cryptographically-inclined group. I imagine I'll have an opportunity to meet everybody at Passwords^12 during the conference — unlike re:invent, I don't expect Passwords^12 to have 5000 attendees! — but I'd be happy to meet up with anyone else in Oslo to discuss FreeBSD or Tarsnap or scrypt or anything else.
From there I'm travelling on to Vienna for a weekend and some opera — I was concertmaster in a student production of Bohème at university, and there's no way I would pass up an opportunity to see it performed at the Wiener Staatsoper — and then a short stop in Stuttgart before I land in Vancouver at 1AM on December 12th.
In total, this trip involves 2 conferences, 4 destinations, 4 airlines, 9 cities, 10 flights, and 36 hours and 14600 miles of flying. Six months ago I told myself that I would never again schedule myself for two conferences in consecutive weeks; at this point, I'm just hoping my luggage avoids getting lost along the way.