POSSCON 2012

POSSCON, an open source software conference in Columbia, SC, is coming up on the 28th and 29th this week and it's time to do a little planning.  The only day that I have available to attend will be on Wednesday the 28th, so I'll be riding up there in the van bright and early with some of my fellow CS students that day.  As far as planning goes, I have whittled the speakers down to six that I'd like to see.  Realistically speaking, I may only see four if there are other things to see or do.  I'll list them here in order of time-slot...mainly to organize myself for the day:

Jim Bowring 10:00 am - 10:45 am

Dr. Bowring is the professor who is teaching the class that I write this blog for.  His presentation is actually on the class, an upper-level software engineering practicum course, and the benefits of using open source projects as a tool for teaching the material.  As a student in the course, I can probably help with his presentation by providing experienced-based feedback to the audience.

Steven A. Brodsky 1:00 pm - 1:45 pm

Dr. Brodsky is the keynote speaker for the day, and holds the title of Distinguished Engineer at IBM.  Just could not miss this one.  He will be speaking about the Hadoop open source framework, big data, and open source in general.  It will be a real treat to hear what he has to say, and then corner him and speak to him in person!

Jim Jagielski OR Carol Smith 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm

Having a real hard time deciding which one of these I want to check out.  Mr. Jagielski is a SR. Consulting Software Engineer for Red Hat and will be speaking about open source licensing.  Carol Smith is a Program Manager for Google and will be presenting on the Google Summer of Code.  This is going to be a tough one.

Dave Abrahams 3:00 pm - 3:45 pm

Mr. Abraham is a founding member of Boost.org, a site that provides C++ libraries.  His topic will be on...C++!  I'm a big fan of C and C++, and look forward to talking to him.

Chris Hinkley 4:00 pm - 4:45 pm

Mr. Hinkley is a Senior Security Engineer at Firehost, a company that provides secure cloud hosting.  I picked this presentation because I have an interest in web hosting, and it will be cool to see how security figures into everything.

And that's my plan!  I still need to sit down and come up with some talking points for each speaker, but other than that I think I'm ready.  Should prove to be a fun day.