This past weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at SCALE13x in Los Angeles, on the Switch as a Server — treating your network switches in the same way you treat your servers.  It’s a topic I feel very strongly about!

As strong as my feelings are about open networking, I also love non-automotive forms of transportation!  So I decided to bike to the airport.  SFO has a lot of bicycle facilities so it was no problem to find parking.

Loaded Bike

My bike loaded up for the trip down

 

Leslie Airport

Slighty tired me at the airport after biking

 

Got to LA on the plane and then Rocket Turtle enjoyed the view by the airport!

Rocket Turtle LAX

Rocket Turtle loves watching the plane contrails

 

… and met some of our great customers!

Rocket Turtle meets Jonathan from Dreamhost

Rocket Turtle meets Jonathan from Dreamhost

Scale is a unique conference in that they encourage canine attendance  — doggies!

 

I met Simba. Picture and Simba courtesy of @spazm

I meet Simba. Picture and Simba courtesy of @spazm

 Friday night I helped out with a birds of a feather (BOF) event, giving advice to job hunters.  Did I mention we’re hiring?

On Saturday evening I won the Weakest Geek — a Weakest Link-style geek-themed trivia contest, run this year by the awesome Ruth Suehle (of Red Hat fame).

The Weakest Geek panel, courtesy of @erinometry

The Weakest Geek panel, courtesy of @erinometry

 

On Sunday I gave my talk on the Switch as a Server — automating your switches using Puppet and Ansible.  I gave a similar talk at Puppetconf 2014 and refined it for this audience.  It went very well and excellent questions were asked about automating your network switches and about how linux works as a networking operating system in general.  The Scale crowd, being Linux enthusiasts, really gets the automation and Linux switching system.

I also had the chance to talk with a lot of folks about their work with Docker, and I learned from Gina Likins how to annoy and offend my open source community (I can’t wait to put those techniques to use with our growing community!).

Overall, SCALE13x was a great conference with a welcoming and intelligent community.

Though after such a big week, the bike and I got a ride home.

If you missed the talk, check out the video!