Tag Archives: apachecon

ApacheCon North America 2014

Last week I had the honor of chairing ApacheCon North America 2014 in Denver Colorado. I could hardly be any prouder of what we were able to do on such an incredibly short timeline. Most of the credit goes to Angela Brown and her amazing team at the Linux Foundation who handled the logistics of the event.

My report to the Apache Software Foundation board follows:

ApacheCon North America 2014 was held April 7-9 in Denver, Colorado, USA. Despite the very late start, we had higher attendance than last year, and almost everyone that I have spoken with has declared it an enormous success. Attendees, speakers and sponsors have all expressed approval of the job that Angela and the Linux Foundation did in the production of the event. Speaking personally, it was the most stress-free ApacheCon I have ever had.

Several projects had dedicated hackathon spaces, while the main hackathon room was unfortunately well off of the beaten path, and went unnoticed by many attendees. We plan to have the main hackathon space much more prominently located in a main traffic area, where it cannot be missed, in Budapest, as I feel that the hackathon should remain a central part of the event, for its community-building opportunities.

Speaking of Budapest, on the first day of the event, we announced ApacheCon Europe, which will be held November 17-21 2014 in Budapest. The website for that is up at http://apachecon.eu/ and the CFP is open, and will close June 25, 2014. We plan to announce the schedule on July 28, 2014, giving us nearly 4 months lead time before the conference. We have already received talk submissions, and a few conference registrations. I will try to provide statistics each month between now and the conference.

As with ApacheCon NA, there will be a CloudStack Collaboration Conference co-located with ApacheCon. We are also discussing the possibility of a co-located Apache OpenOffice user-focused event on the 20th and 21st, or possibly just one day.

We eagerly welcome proposals from other projects which wish to have similar co-located events, or other more developer- or PMC-focused events like the Traffic Server Summit, which was held in Denver.

Discussion has begun regarding a venue for ApacheCon North America 2015, with Austin and Las Vegas early favorites, but several other cities being considered.

I’ll be posting several more things abut it, because they deserve individual attention. Also, we’ll be posting video and audio from the event on the ApacheCon website in the very near future.

ApacheCon welcomes SourceForge back for another year

The following guest post appears on the SourceForge blog today. I’m personally very pleased to welcome SourceForge back to ApacheCon for another year.

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The Apache Software Foundation is pleased to announce ApacheCon US 2014, which we’re presenting in conjunction with the Linux Foundation. The conference will be held in Denver, Colorado, and features three days, ten tracks of content on more than 70 of the Apache Software Foundation’s Open Source projects, including Apache OpenOffice, Apache Hadoop, Apache Lucene, and many others.

We’re especially pleased to welcome SourceForge as a media partner for this event.

See http://na.apachecon.com/ for the full schedule, as well as the evening events, BOFs, Lightning Talks, and project summits.

Co-located with the event is the Cloudstack Collaboration Conference – http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/cloudstack-collaboration-conference-north-america – the best place to learn about Apache CloudStack.

Apache OpenOffice – http://openoffice.apache.org/ – has an entire day of content, including both technical and community talks.

Hadoop, and its ecosystem of Big Data projects, has more than five full days of content (two tracks on two days, one track on the other).

Other projects, such as Cordova, Tomcat, and the Apache http server, have a fully day, or two, of content.

If you want to learn more about Apache Allura (Incubating), an Open Source software forge (and also the code that runs SourceForge) we’ll have two presentations about Allura, by two of the engineers who work on that code: Dave Brondsema and Wayne Witzel. Learn how to use Allura to develop your own projects, and join the community to make the platform even better.

This is the place to come if you rely on any of the projects of the Apache Software Foundation, and if you want to hang out with the men and women who develop them. We’ve been doing this event since 1998, and this promises to be the best one yet, with more content than we’ve ever presented before.

ApacheCon EU

ApacheCon EU starts tomorrow, and, for the first time ever, I won’t be there.

In fact, today is my very last chance to say this – I’ve been to every (official) ApacheCon. In fact, if you don’t count 1998, I’m the only person who has been to every ApacheCon.

In 1998, there was an event called ApacheCon, in San Francisco, hosted by CNet, but that was before the Apache Software Foundation was formed. So I choose not to count that one.

Then, in 2000, I spoke at ApacheCon 2000 in Orlando. Then there was London 2000 with Douglas Adams keynoting. Since then, we’ve been a lot of places, including Santa Clara, San Diego, Las Vegas, Atlanta, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Dublin, Vancouver (Canada) and Stuttgart – not in that order.And Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I met Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, it’s the Sri Lanka one that lets me claim the honor of being the only person to go to every one, because the only ASF members there were me, Ken Coar, and Danese Cooper.

But, tomorrow, ApacheCon EU starts, in Sinsheim Germany, and I won’t be there. Already many of my friends have gathered there, and are having dinner there right now. I wish I could be there with them, and not just because it would keep my record intact. I love ApacheCon. I love giving and attending the talks. I love spending time with old friends and meeting new ones. I love the passion of the community, and learning about the new sub-communities that are joining the larger Apache family.

And I sincerely hope that the is the last one I’ll miss.

Looking forward to ApacheCon North America 2013 in Portland. I plan to be at that one. You should come, too.

Apache Web Server training, mod_rewrite training

I’ll be teaching two training classes at the upcoming ApacheCon in Atlanta in November.

On Monday, I’ll be teaching Apache, Nuts to Bolts, with Jim Jagielski, another long-time contributor to the Apache httpd project. This class is a day-long training on everything from obtaining and installing the server to configuration, third-party modules, and security, and everything in between.

On Tuesday, I’ll be teaching a half-day training onmod_rewrite, the most powerful, and probably most confusing module, and the source of the majority of questions on any given Apache support forum.

I’d love to have you in my classes. ApacheCon will be fun, as always, and Atlanta is a great city. We’d love to see you there.

mod_rewrite docs rewrite at ApacheCon

The plan, (assuming I don’t get sidetracked on a million other things, which is what usually happens) is to do a major overhaul of the mod_rewrite documentation during the hackathon at ApacheCon. Please speak up if you have specific comments or recommendations. So far, the outline is something like this.

1) A couple of years ago, I split the “Rewrite Guide” into basic and advanced. This was ill-advised, and the division was stupid. Now it’s just harder to find stuff. Going to re-merge those, and then try to do a division based on topic, rather than difficulty, since that’s not a particularly useful concept.

2) Rewrite cookbook, divided into categories of, perhaps:
a. redirecting/remapping
b. controlling access
c. when not to use mod_rewrite (aka ‘mod_rewrite is obsolete’)
d. advanced features

3) Scrap the inscrutable examples. Both the guide and the formal docs are littered with examples that either never happen in the real world, or are done better using some of the built-in functionality of other modules like mod_alias and mod_dir. Scrap those examples entirely, rather than continuing to try to make then scrutable.

4) Rewrite Flags documentation. Started this years ago, and never really finished it. Also, needs to be updated to include the new flags that have been added in 2.2 and trunk.

5) General grammatical overhaul, hopefully with help from Noirin, who has better grammar than all the rest of us put together. (Actually, that’s the problem – it was written by all of the rest of us put together, resulting in a mish-mash of styles and voices.)

6) A document about (so-called) S.E.O. uses of mod_rewrite, discussing both the techniques that can be used, and the misinformation that tends to drive the desire to use those techniques. This needs to be handled carefully, because there’s a tendency to simply state that all SEO is snake oil – which much of it is – and ignore the topic entirely. But, folks are going to do this stuff whether or not we approve, and it’s better if they do it well. At least, that’s what I think at this particular moment.

2c, above, is both about stuff that you shouldn’t do with mod_rewrite at all, and also some of the new features in 2.2 and trunk that make mod_rewrite unnecessary.

Tomcat at ApacheCon

Tomcat is one of the oldest members of the Apache family, and one of the standard building blocks of the web as we know it today. It can sometimes fall below the radar, because it just works, so most folks are completely unaware of it.

Filip Hanik will be doing a training class on Tomcat at ApacheCon this year. I spoke with him last week for Feathercast, and I’ve finally edited it. You can listen here, or come to ApacheCon and hear him there.

Apache HTTP Server – Nuts to Bolts

ApacheCon is just a few weeks away. Jim and I are doing our Nuts to Bolts training class again, with all new content, because of all the cool new stuff that has gone in to Apache over the last year. Don’t miss it!

A two-day training covering everything you need to know to administer an Apache HTTP Server.

Day one, led by Jim Jagielski, give the overview of the server, showing you the core architecture of the server, how the modular nature of the server works, and shows you the most important of the modules. You’ll learn how to install the server, how to configure it, secure it, and performance-tune it.

Day two, led by Rich Bowen, takes a more hands-on, recipe driven approach. You’ll learn how to accomplish common tasks, install third party modules, and troubleshoot common problems. Examples are taken from questions often asked on the support mailing lists and IRC channels.

Jim and Rich have both been working with the Apache HTTP Server for more than ten years, and have both taught training classes for many of those years.

ApacheCon day … something

Yesterday, I felt absolutely wretched. This used to happen to me a lot at conferences. I’d get sick the first day or two, and miss a lot of stuff. I spent most of yesterday napping.

I feel a lot better today, but am still very tired.

This afternoon – in about 2 hours – I’ve got my mod_rewrite presentation, and then tonight I’m MCing the Lightning Talks, since Fred and Fitz aren’t here this year. Could be fun. You should come.