GeekFest 2010 - how it was

Introduction

It's a shame to be far from the epicenter of important events: seminars, conferences, master classes. It’s a shame to be a developer and live in the provinces, to observe that only marketing events take place around. Work and make interesting software solutions and not be able to share their experiences.

A small meeting of habro-users living in Irkutsk pushed for the organization of an event that helped programmers communicate, not managers. Now that a lot of time has passed since the conference, it is time to take stock.

Preparatory work

The aforementioned meeting was held in the Rio Grande restaurant, well-known for the Irkutsk habrovchan. The programmers and sympathizers present at the meeting complained about the need to meet more often, and it was there that I had an idea to hold a sort of seminar.

The moon was in the right phase, just at that time I was able to agree on the arrival in Irkutsk of my great friend Philip Torchinsky, who works at Sun Microsystems (already Oracle). One and a half years and cheers, the evangelist of one of the largest IT companies in the world comes to give several lectures at the university ( ISTU ), where I have the honor to lecture as a hobby.

One thing happened with the other and finally formed the goal of an IT event. The matter remains for the small: to agree with the leadership of the institute, so that we would be given a hall and presentation equipment. They didn’t let me go to the bodies of big bosses, they landed me at the level of Deputy Pro-Rector for Information Technologies. There was a very strange conversation in the style of “thrash-mosh”. As a result, in almost two weeks, I received no positive or negative response.
')
I finally decided to blunder away from bureaucracy and spit on ISTU and look for a hall for events in other places. It should be noted that my main place of work is an academic institute - ISEM SB RAS. I walk along the corridor, and to meet me a "commercial director":
- Sergey, the idea is to hold an event in the auditorium, everything will be cultural and even very informative.
- If neatly, then of course you can) only book a day at the secretariat.
- Thank.

As a result of a five-minute conversation, our event had a hall and everything became more than real. The case is left for small, to solve two small problems:

• the participants;
• speakers

Both problems, as it turned out, are strongly connected with each other. But having a certain pool of friends who wanted to speak, a phone book and a time that tends to zero, quickly enough managed to solve a problem called: “Why would I be pleased to hear myself?”.

Solving the problem of filling the hall with adequate and interested listeners, I came to the conclusion that it was necessary to make posters for the event and distribute them throughout the city. To solve this goal, I used the services of a very good person - dvan , who is the author of one of the most popular in narrow circles comic book “ Hello ACS ”. D.Van made a personal poster for our event, which by that time acquired:

• the name "GeekFest 2010";
• twitter ;
• domain name .

Since there were not enough hands to do everything, I had to use the kindly offered help of my former student - svartalf . SvartalF took the trouble to create a web-based program, which had to be shown to potential conference participants as the main enticement.

On March 3, our posters were ready and we distributed them safely to distributors: to universities, student dormitories, and even pasted around the city. Unfortunately, putting up around the city was already almost completely destroyed within a few hours, apparently, huge crowds of IT homeless people live in the city, who tear down similar posters with maniacal persistence.

But small troubles did not frighten us, and we eagerly waited for X hours.

The conference

Right before the conference, special badges were made for a narrow circle of friends, the organizing committee and speakers. Our badges were double and sometimes triple bottom. They were written in a joking manner and we did not make them for all conference participants, so as not to traumatize the psyche. For example, for the aforementioned Philip, the inscription on the badge said: “I drink beer at the employer's expense,” and for all the girls on the registration: “A specially trained girl,” although one had the badge read: “A girl with outstanding abilities.”

It seems to me it makes no sense to talk about how the performances took place, it’s better to see it with my own eyes. On March 11, an unknown cameraman shot all the speeches of our conference for us, unfortunately, the memory of the hero’s name stubbornly refuses to suggest the memory (after prompts, the memory came to life samasam ). The speeches were processed and you can familiarize yourself with almost all of them:

1. Alexander Batsuev “The process of creating a project. AnyChart.Com.
2. Evgeny Potapov "The growth of site traffic: problems and solutions."
3. Philip Torchinsky "Virtualization in Solaris: zones, xVM, VirtualBox".
4. Alexander Petrovsky “The Virtualization Mechanism in FreeBSD. FreeBSD Jails.
5. Philip Torchinsky "The concept and new technologies ZFS".
6. Anton Chernousov "Sex + Drugs + Rock & Roll".
7. Sergey Kiselev, “Layering of the system into levels or when unit tests work”.
8. Evgeny Chuikov, Nikita Kuznetsov "Django is a web framework for perfectionists with deadlines."
9. Aleksey Loss “Asynchronous Servers in Python. Review of approaches and solutions.
10. Kirill Afanasyev "Review of modern technologies for creating RIA-applications."
11. Phillip Torchinsky “What makes Solaris, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and Linux different and how are they different?”

My performance was just before the coffee break. Clearly realizing that by this time the audience would be very tired, I had to do a not very technical report. His goal was to cheer up and somewhat animate the audience, I think you yourself can appreciate it:



In addition, Alexander Sidorov , a photographer for the Kommersant newspaper (in Irkutsk), responded to the call of the organizing committee. Taking advantage of a serious photo, Alexander found more than seven hundred photos .

In addition, we had a lot of volunteers and you can see their photos. For example, Andrei Marinchenko enthusiastically photographed the conference participants . And these photos were made by Daria Tabitueva, they mainly reflect the speakers. Our great friend Taras Majara also put his hand to the camera.

Conclusion

In fact, in my opinion, our event was a success, but so successfully that we decided to hold small seminars and master classes on a regular basis, as well as to hold large, in the scale of our city, conferences called GeekFest.

P.S. You may reasonably ask: "A banquet?". And I will tell you that everything ended where it began, namely in the restaurant Rio Grande.