This past weekend, iXsystems attended another successful LinuxFest Northwest conference in Bellingham, Washington. From the moment we crossed state borders, Washington’s endless span of greenery welcomed us. We have faithfully attended this show for over seven years, and every time we are warmly received by the diverse and friendly community at Bellingham Technical College.
One of the highlights of this trip was meeting Chris Fisher and the awesome team of Jupiter Broadcasting. These guys independently host a variety of highly entertaining shows including TechSnap, Linux Action Show, and SciByte at: JupiterBroadcasting.com. Chris as well as Allan Jude are avid FreeNAS and iXsystems fans, and the FreeNAS Mini was featured in at least one of their shows. In case anyone is wondering, yes, they are just as charming in person as on air.
The team kept busy at the table on Saturday. Annie and James tirelessly answered questions and passed out horns while Denise caught up with several community members and updated them on iXsystems’ current open source initiatives.
On Sunday, there was more time to attend presentations held upstairs. Denise sat in on Deb Nicholson’s talk, a helpful rundown for IT professionals on how to successfully manage projects and delegate tasks. We later dropped in on James’s talk where he gave a quick summary of PC-BSD and FreeNAS and how users can use the two to accomplish basic webdev tasks.
A well-anticipated event that is always present at Linuxfest Northwest is the World-Famous Raffle held at the end of the show on both days. The prizes were considerably sought-after this year and included a solar-powered keyboard, UseNIX LISA ‘13 conference ticket, OnLive Playstation controller, an HP Chrome notebook, Raspberry Pi’s, O’Reilly-donated books, and a Pogo-donated workstation. One eager participant – who goes by “BJ”- bought $200 worth of raffle tickets, hoping he would win big. He walked away with a free subscription of online Drupal classes and more O’Reilly books than he can count.
We would like to thank the volunteers and staff at LinuxFest Northwest. This year’s show was a success, and the team already looks forward to next year’s event!
Lisa Liang
Marketing Assistant
