We attended InstallFest over the weekend. I thought this year's event went very well, and it was quite busy.
Not that many of the talks appealed to me personally, but they rarely do. I prefer to study things in depth myself, and I am not the target audience for events like this. From the feedback I have heard, the people they were aimed at enjoyed them.
You can see the photos at foto.vpsfree.cz and find the other videos on the YouTube channel.
I think the vpsFree.cz track at InstallFest, where we introduced beginners to running open-source software on servers, turned out quite well. The talks the guys gave were great. They were practical, with instructions detailed enough to make an article you could follow to set things up. Every one of them exceeded my expectations. I really enjoyed it.
Pavel Šnajdr: I gave the introduction to the vpsFree track. I hope I covered what was needed.
Petr Krčmář gave a good talk on remote server administration: the first thing a beginner needs to deal with, getting into the server at all, and doing it securely while keeping it simple and convenient. It worked out well. You can tell Petr has plenty of experience presenting and is a seasoned speaker. I was also very pleased to see the vpsFree.cz logo next to Root's logo in his slides and in a talk outside the vpsFree track. To me, that suggests we are no longer a random little group of people, but are starting to mean something and becoming a name that Linux users in the Czech Republic and Slovakia recognize. Thank you for giving the talk under our name, and for that recognition too.
Standa Petr gave a talk about a web server. He chose Apache, which is still fairly mainstream and remains relevant despite lighter alternatives, and which he understands exceptionally well. He spoke without notes and knew his subject, taking care to explain even the more complex concepts in a way beginners could follow. His talk ran a little long, but my introduction had been very short, so that balanced out nicely. Overall, Standa impressed me as a speaker.
Vojta Brzek ended up giving the talk in place of Jirka Medvěd. Honestly, email is not one of my favorite subjects because of the mess it is in. But Vojta presented it in a clear structure, explained it well and introduced things gradually. Although I only caught part of the talk, he deserves credit. He handled a daunting subject very well, and dealt with technical mishaps brilliantly without letting them affect him.
The feedback on my talk about SSDs in servers has been fairly positive. Personally, I am disappointed that I did not get around to preparing it earlier and run benchmarks so I could back up my claims with actual numbers. But in the end, it does not seem to have bothered anyone much. At least I have not heard anything suggesting it did.
Otherwise, I think it went reasonably well. My talk was 15 minutes shorter than it could have been, but fortunately Vojta had overrun by exactly those 15 minutes, so the whole block of talks by vpsFree people finished right on time. Hody (Petr Hodač, the IF organizer) stayed calm and would not even have noticed if someone had not explicitly told him.
It went that smoothly.
During our block, a total of five new members signed up. We know it was because of the talks, since every one of them said so in the "Where did you hear about us?" field of the application. One of them was not even there in person and watched the stream. We told everyone they could try a VPS from us, so we do not know whether they will stay. But even if they do not, they will have some experience with us.
It will be interesting to see whether our presence at InstallFest has any further direct effect on membership growth. Unfortunately, indirect effects are hard to measure. For example, someone who heard about us at IF might recommend membership to somebody else, who then names that person as their source of information about vpsFree. They certainly would not name InstallFest, since they might not even know we were there, assuming all Czech and Slovak Linux users even know there is an InstallFest.
Overall, I like how it turned out. It fits very well with the direction I would like our association to take. This gave us some publicity, but we also helped spread knowledge about Linux server administration and perhaps encouraged a few people to start playing with these technologies. We will certainly want to do as much of this as possible in the future, until everyone has their own server. Even if it is not with us in the end. That is not essential.