ApacheCon Asia was, in my estimation, a big success, and I’m so glad I got to go. I was also able to attend a post-conference event called the GeekOut, where we went out into the jung.le and got our blood sucked out by leeches, among other fantastic experiences.

Here’s some of my thoughts on the conference, as well as some remarks on the GeekOut. The recording is HERE, and is roughly 5 minutes long.

The music is from a traditional dance group at the closing ceremonies of the conference.

You can see photos from ApacheCon and GeekOut on flickr.com by looking for tags like apacheconasia06 and geekout srilanka.

The Lightning Lottery Talks are a fixture at ApacheCon, with talks ranging from “What’s on Ken’s Belt?” to “Shared Ant”. There’s always a good mix of entertaining talks and technical talks, and the speaker pool includes seasoned public speakers and first-time speakers enjoying their opportunity for a moment at the mic.

Over the next few months, we’ll be running almost all of the lightning talks from ApacheCon Europe, and in this first one of the Lightning Episodes, you’ll hear Leo Simons, teaching us how to give a lightning talk, and Johan Stuyts talking about Shared Ant, a build environment for collaborate development.

The music in the intro and at the end is Colm McCarthaigh again, playing “Lakes of Pontchartrain.”

The recording is HERE, and is roughly 12 minutes long.

I got a chance to chat briefly with Greg Stein, the Chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, while at ApacheCon. We talked a little about what his role is within the ASF, as well as how the ASF relates to members and their employers.

The music at the start and end of the podcast was performed by Colm McCarthaigh and Paul Freemantle one night at the conference.

The podcast is here (Approx 9 minutes)