Improvisation is everything – FrOSCon 2019

Step by step to FrOSCon14 – that’s how you could describe the ATIX crew’s journey to FrOSCon. After getting to know the Free and Open Source Conference at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences as participants and supervisors of the Foreman Community stand, we now wanted to shine with our own stand.

That’s why preparations had already been in full swing for weeks: the ATIX crew actively participated in the call for papers, collected all the stand materials and packed them well sorted on a pallet.

Um unser orcharhino gut in Szene zu setzen, lassen wir uns für fast jede Konferenz was neues einfallen: Dieses Mal hätten wir neben unseren begehrten Lego rhino unser brandneues Origami orcharhino im Gepäck gehabt.

We come up with something new for almost every conference to showcase our orcharhino: This time, in addition to our coveted Lego rhino, we would have had our brand new Origami orcharhino in our luggage.

Of course, we also wanted to promote the Foreman community and would have liked to distribute T-shirts.

So we were really well prepared (thanks again to our event team for the excellent preparation 😉 )…

BUT: Did you notice the subjunctive mood in the last lines?

But first things first:

Full of anticipation, seven members of the ATIX crew set off for Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences in St. Augustin.

When we arrived there after a few hours’ drive, we were greeted by a super-prepared location (a big thank you to the FrOSCon team – you’re great!) and a surprise: where was the pallet we had sent with the shipping company – with the stand, T-shirts, popcorn machine and much more?

But we decided not to panic for the time being. We assumed that the truck driver would be stuck in a traffic jam with our pallet and that it would be delivered to the agreed location the next day at the latest. But let’s make a long story short: there was no sign of the haulier with our stand all weekend. We only saw our material again in the office on Tuesday morning.

So we had to improvise, because after all, we are from IT and can solve any challenge!

So konnten wir mit Hilfe der FrOSCon-Crew, einigen Mitausstellern sowie durch Unterstützung aus dem ATIX-Headquarter schnell eine Pinnwand und einige Plakate organisieren. Mit einem schnell im Elektrofachmarkt besorgten Monitor und einem Stapel frisch gedruckter Flyer sah unser improvisierter Stand tiptop aus. So konnten wir wie gewohnt den Besuchern unser orcharhino demonstrieren und mit ihnen Flappy-orcharhino zocken.

With the help of the FrOSCon crew, some co-exhibitors and support from the ATIX headquarters, we were quickly able to organize a pinboard and some posters. With a monitor quickly procured from the electronics store and a stack of freshly printed flyers, our improvised stand looked tiptop. As usual, we were able to demonstrate our orcharhino to visitors and play Flappy-orcharhino with them.

Shortly before the end of the first day of the conference, I gave my presentation on “Saltstack meets Foreman”. I was very pleased about the great interest in it and had many conversations with Users of Salt or Foreman with Salt Plugin.

We ended the day with a good portion of pulled pork/beef at the annual FrOSCon community event in glorious weather.

We used the second day to inform ourselves about current developments in the open source world in presentations. At our stand, we were delighted to receive plenty of visitors from customers, acquaintances & perhaps one or two future members of the ATIX crew.

The highlights on Sunday were of course the two presentations by my colleagues. At FrOSCon14, Sebastian Oehlke showed that Terraform can be used for more than just provisioning servers in the cloud.

My colleague David presented his work on the automated setup of workshop environments, as we also create them for our own training courses on Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, orcharhino and Puppet.

It was another great weekend – despite the initial difficulties. With this in mind, we left FrOSCon14 and are sure that we will have an absolute showcase conference stand at FrOSCon15 in 2020!