It’s only 8:30 local time, but I’m pretty wiped out. Day one has been amazing.

The morning started with the keynotes, which included the State of the Feather, with Ross Gardler, two sponsor keynotes by Mike Maxey (Pivotal), and Chip Childers (Cloud Foundry), and then the main opening keynote by Brian Behlendorf. Brian has long been someone that I’ve really looked up to, not just because he catalyzed the Apache web server project, but because of the deep thought that he’s given to issues around Open Source, community, and our role as responsible members of the human race. (Videos coming soon of all these keynotes.)

Right after the keynote, I moderated what I’ve been referring to as the “grey beard panel”, where several members of the original Apache Group (Jim Jagielski, Dirk-Willem  van Gulik, Randy Terbush, Brian Behlendorf, Roy Fielding, and Ken Coar) reminisced about how things were in the early days, what mistakes were made, what things they might have done differently (SSL was a big item on this list), and other related items.

I’ve long joked that I do ApacheCon so that I can travel to exciting places and hang out on stage with my heroes. This was definitely one of those moments.

In the afternoon I gave my “Write a Better FM” talk, which is a continually evolving thing. Rikki said some very encouraging things about it. In all, I think it went really well.

Then we had the reception at Old School, which was very nice, if a little loud. And now I’m back in the hotel room trying to decide whether to catch up on email, or go seek out some more social -ness. Probably go with the former and go to bed early.