AlmaLinux Day: LA happened just over a week ago, on Saturday, July 18, at the E-Central Downtown Los Angeles Hotel, and it was a genuinely great day. We got to hang out with some of our new best friends, and I left with the strong sense that we’re doing something right.
The day
Doors opened just before 9, and we had a real rush: a big chunk of attendees showed up to the event in that first hour. That’s always a good feeling, if a slightly frantic one. We also got a noticeable bump of arrivals just after lunch, which almost never happens. People looked at the schedule, picked the sessions they wanted, and showed up for them specifically. I’ll take that as a compliment to the program.
David Duncan staffing at the registration desk.
Lunch was onsite and so, so tasty. We had a fantastic partner in the folks at E-Central Hotel, and I cannot thank them enough for their flexibility and generousity as hosts for our event.
Lunch onsite, courtesy of our hosts at the E-Central Hotel.
At the end of the day, Tristan talked me into offering to take everyone who could join us out for drinks and snacks to keep the conversations going. We had a great time connecting more deeply with some of our attendees, and even picked up some friends while we were waiting for the table!
Our new besties at the closest place that could suddenly take 15 people.
The speakers
Thank you to everyone who spoke. A single-track day lives or dies on the lineup, and this one was excellent:
- David Duncan, AWS
- Karsten Gaier, NI SP GmbH
- Neal Gompa, Velocity Limitless
- Syed Usman Ahmad, Grafana Labs
- Chris Taylor, Taksati Consulting
- Stephen Winters, Cinesite
- Nick Cannon, Visual Effects Society
- Jean-Francois Panisset, ASWF CI Working Group and VES Technology Committee
- Tristan Théroux, AlmaLinux Media & Entertainment SIG
They covered everything from our brand new Creative Installer to data visualization and observability, and just about every layer in between: the cloud, the workstation, the render pipeline, and the tooling that ties it all together. For a single-track day, the range was remarkable.
The bobbleheads
Last year we started giving away bobblehead figurines at our Vancouver AlmaLinux Day and they were so popular we’ve done them twice more now. I don’t know what it is about them, but our people go nuts for them every time!
The AlmaLinux Day: LA bobbleheads, which did not last long.
The crowd
This is the part I keep thinking about: Last year in Vancouver (our first event adjacent to SIGGRAPH), the room was mostly local Linux user groups and universities, with a few M&E people. Wonderful people and a great day, and it was the crowd one might expect for our first AlmaLinux Day focused on VFX.
This year the room was full of people from the industry. Walt Disney Animation Studios, Cinesite, Ingenuity Studios, WeFX, ILM, and Bind Studio were all there, along with the Visual Effects Society and the Academy Software Foundation. AWS and AMD were in the mix too. And Lenovo sent us hardware to showcase AlmaLinux for the entire week.
This year was a media and entertainment room, and it tells me something about where AlmaLinux is landing in creative infrastructure right now. The work the Media & Entertainment SIG has been doing is reflected in who gave up their Saturday to come see us.
Recordings are coming
Every session was recorded, and they’re being edited now. Expect the full playlist within a couple of weeks. We’ll link it from the event page, the newsletter, share it on social and in the ~almalinux-days room as soon as it’s ready.
The week at SIGGRAPH
We spent the rest of that week at SIGGRAPH, at booth 735, and it was a great chance to keep the conversations going. We’re so grateful to Lenovo and AMD for the chance to show of a bunch of different configurations of hardware showing off AlmaLinux.
Our SIGGRAPH booth (735), showing off AlmaLinux across a range of Lenovo hardware.
We were so excited to be able to show off Houdini running on AlmaLinux 10.2 (though it isn’t officially supported yet) to help move the efforts of the Wayland Working Group forward.
We were so grateful to the folks at Lightcatcher Media for allowing us to show off the Little Margo Stories trailer on one of our devices, too!
Thank you to everyone who stopped by to talk about AlmaLinux in production, complain about your render farm, or nothing at all. We like talking to people, and it was the perfect way to close out the week.
Get involved
If you have event planning experience and want to help us put on more of these, we’re always looking for help. Join the Marketing room on chat.almalinux.org and we’ll bring you in!
If you just want to support us or participate in the community in a digital way, you can answer questions on our forum, Reddit, Mastodon, or share our posts on LinkedIn, and YouTube, and subscribe to the newsletter on LinkedIn or via our mailing list.
