Well, day one of SCALE is over and I am just sat in the hotel restaurant having had breakfast. Yesterday was great. Good mix of exhibitors (much bigger than last year, about twice the size) and a good range of talks.

My talk (Herding Cats) went pretty well. It was standing room only in the room and the audience were fun and responsive, and it was great fun delivering the talk. Doing talks when the audience are on the same page as you is always a pleasure to do. There were also a number of interesting questions at the end of the talk.

I then headed out to do a couple of interviews and a few meetings. After dinner I had an Ubuntu BOF scheduled, and I was not aware of this until a few hours previous. I was expecting to cancel it, but a number of people showed up and it quickly turned into a Q+A session with me about Ubuntu, Canonical, Launchpad and various other things. It was a really interesting and fun session, and the people who attended are hugely passionate about Ubuntu and free software. It is meeting people like that that give me a real kick out of my work – the community never ceases to impress me.

After this was a raffle. Any rumours about me throwing a small Python book at Dave Neary while he had nodded off have been grossly exaggerated. Then followed a game of pictionary which quickly descended into mockery of the teams involved. Like last year, Meryl decided to that I was ripe for humiliation and went so far as having her own special pile of pictionary terms for me, such as *Intellectual Property*. Gee, thanks. Mind, she got her revenge when I gave her *Functional Programming Linguistics*. Hah, enjoy that.

Then followed mucho drinks and discussion, and it was great to hang out with a bunch of people in the bar, including the always fun Jeremy from LinuxQuestions. 🙂

Right, onto day 2…