I am an Internet-enabled scribbling hermit. What else would you call someone who works perched atop a sofa, in his jammies, sporting a 5 o'clock shadow. I work day and night, which is to say I work across timezones.
And I love what I do -- write on free and open source software.
For the most part, my work involves interacting with tarballs, compilers, and terminals. But sometimes I step out of the shell (no pun intended) and meet real people! People who write the software I write about.
I have been attending conferences ever since I was old enough to pack my own bags, and not forget underpants in hotel rooms. I have attended technical conferences, business conferences, and conferences that try to blend the two.
But I don't attend conferences for the presentations.
The real content in *any* free software conference are the speakers themselves. As a journalist, not only do I save on the registration fees (yay!), I get the undivided attention of the people whom I admire -- the venerable geek with his stickered laptop.
I was once one too. Now I just write software to scratch my own itch. What many people fail to realize is that most of the free software press are techies themselves. There's always the one with an English degree to check our overzealous use of clichés. But most of us have just traded in our vanilla text editors for fancy ones that count words, and have sworn an oath to never use curly braces and minimise decorating our text with semi-colons.
In my experience, this misconception about members of the free software "press" is very apparent at conferences. In a business conference, to a suit, I am always a business-illiterate grizzly hacker. To a "real" grizzly hacker I am a clueless git.
And I enjoy playing the part. Squeezing juicy bits of information, and sometimes just being naughty masquerading leading questions and getting them to say something they shouldn't. With a hacker, I sometimes slip in a bit of technical stuff to catch the "oh, you know that" exclamation of surprise.
But what I love the most is experiencing the clean-shaven suits interact with the bearded khakis. My first experience of the contrast, was at a breakfast meeting with the head-honcho of Novell India and the founding geek of their recent acquisition, Ximian, who walked up to the table with a cigarette on his ears!
I was awestruck.
Many conferences later, I am still to shake off my man-crush on geeks. I haven't been to a business conference in a while, but I savoured every bit of the Gnome Asia Summit in Bangalore. I always make it a point to stay at the same hotel as the speakers. It keeps me in the thick of the action from breakfast till dinner. The only downside is that they suck all the bandwidth and choke the network.
Please guys, cut us some slack. We are geeks too!
