OSCAL 2019 trip report

OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) is an annual conference in Tirana focused on software freedom, open knowledge, free culture and decentralization. And I was there last weekend!

The purpose of my visit was to give a talk (Linux distributions, lifecycles, and containers), to learn about the conference and the community (I have been invited many times), and to talk to people about Fedora.

There were more beginners in the audience than I initially expected, but I believe my talk was a good fit inspite of that. People gave me a lot of positive feedback, and some of them told me it gave them some new things to research and think about. Modularity was the most favourite part of the talk as there were a few real needs for it, mostly with nodejs.

I was talking a lot about what are containers, about the topic of installation vs. long-term maintenance of software and the benefits of Linux distributions connected to that, and also about Kubernetes. I don’t recall any general open source discussions as that was well understood (and strongly prefered) accross all the guests.

One bonus, we did the Slideshow Karaoke I first organized at DevConf.cz and was a good fun!

This was my first time in Albania and I loved it. It was very different from the other European countries I’ve been to (I mean it in a good way), and after I got used to the seemingly chaotic traffic, I was really enjoying my stay there. All the people I talked to were very friendly. I would definitely come back.