OsmoDevCon 2017 Review

After the public user-oriented OsmoCon 2017, we also recently had the 6th incarnation of our annual contributors-only Osmocom Developer Conference: The OsmoDevCon 2017.

This is a much smaller group, typically about 20 people, and is limited to actual developers who have a past record of contributing to any of the many Osmocom projects.

We had a large number of presentation and discussions. In fact, so large that the schedule of talks extended from 10am to midnight on some days. While this is great, it also means that there was definitely too little time for more informal conversations, chatting or even actual work on code.

We also have such a wide range of topics and scope inside Osmocom, that the traditional ad-hoch scheduling approach no longer seems to be working as it used to. Not everyone is interested in (or has time for) all the topics, so we should group them according to their topic/subject on a given day or half-day. This will enable people to attend only those days that are relevant to them, and spend the remaining day in an adjacent room hacking away on code.

It's sad that we only have OsmoDevCon once per year. Maybe that's actually also something to think about. Rather than having 4 days once per year, maybe have two weekends per year.

Always in motion the future is.