I had the pleasure of attending one of the GSLUG [Greater Seattle Linux Users Group] on the 12th.

I was really surprised at the quality of the event. Allow me to explain.

I’m used to these type of occasions being hosted in a filthy classroom or basement of a university or community college and attended by unwashed beasts that are fueled entirely by high fructose corn syrup and not really talking about anything of note besides arguing about what distro is better. This has been my past experience.

Thankfully, this was not one of those events.

This gathering was in a great facility provided by Speakeasy. They even threw down for pizza, salad, fruit and drinks. I’m in training and had none of it, but I appreciated the gesture.

A couple of the talks were particularly interesting as I haven’t been a day to day sysadmin for several years. It’s nice to be able to drop in on things and see some of the recurring problems solved in interesting ways.

First was a talk by Bryan McLellan about how he runs his infrastructure at Widemile.

The second that I found of interest was a demo of git, an alternative to code management systems such as subversion, by John Locke which showed how the compare, a demonstration of how it functions in routine situations, and a Q&A that focused mainly on what git does well and what subversion does not.

I’ll make sure to do my best to attend future meetings of this group. They’re a cool bunch.