January 2015 News

Shadowcat's Managing Director, Mark Keating, was recently voted onto the council for FLOSSUK. Mark has been involved with FLOSS for some time and has even presented at FLOSSUK conferences including Spring 2014 and the upcoming Spring 2015 events.

Shadowcat Systems Limited are corporate members of FLOSSUK, Ian Norton has served on the council for three years and Matt S. trout has also been a regular attendee and speaker at FLOSSUK (and the former UKUUG) events for a number of years.

This year Shadowcat Systems and FLOSSUK will be organising a conference, the Dynamic Language conference, together. Mark has also been involved in discussing using new media techniques for FLOSS. It was for these two reasons that Mark felt it wisest to agree when he was co-opted to a place on the council so that he could further help at a recognised position.

Notes

FOSDEM is only a couple of weeks away,[1] and for the first time in their history the Shadowcat team will be making an appearance.[2]

There have been a variety of reasons over the years why we have failed to attend this premier event, but the major one is that we get blindsided by it each time. It gets to January and we are usually in Florida for the occasionally annual Perl Oasis and the return from that sees us missing FOSDEM from the calendar. This is especially true when there is a FLOSSUK event soon after.

This year sees us more closely linked to FLOSSUK but with a gap in the schedule as there is no Perl Oasis. It therefore seemed opportune to take the chance to attend FOSDEM for the first time and to take a group from the Lancaster offices with us. So a small contingent from the Lancaster staff will be at the event including Matt S. Trout, Mark Keating, Ian Norton, Tom Bloor and Errietta Kostala.

We will be hanging around a number of the developer rooms and groups, so look for us on the Perl stand, in the Perl Devroom where Matt will be giving a talk, with the developers from OpenNMS and likely propping up a part of a bar.

Notes

[0] Even for a dad joke that's poor.

[1] For those of you not familiar with the event it is one of the largest Open Source events on the planet, each year over five thousand open source practitioners and advocates gather in Brussels for a long weekend of discussion and latest projects announcements.

[2] I almost did the cliché with 'for the first time in forever'.