One of our goals this year is to attend more conferences outside of San Francisco, and after the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, I think it’s the right call. We’re a nerdy bunch, and we definitely felt in our element. After James was on a panel discussing why “Monitoring Sucks,” he was pulled into dozens of nitty-gritty conversations about integrating and deploying monitoring solutions and the cost/benefits of rolling your own.

It was a great crowd with a lot of great open source projects on the go, even if I feel I may have to hand in my nerd card for my lack of github followers. In my defense, I managed to weigh our helium balloons to neutral buoyancy quicker than the Linux Chix (we were studying air currents in the conference hall, as one does [I loved their penguins]). There are already some good recaps out there, but I missed the talks and can’t comment on those (though I only heard good things). Apart from the great customer contact, we picked up a few exciting resumes from applicants. Ilan and the all volunteer team did a great job, and I expect we’ll be at SCALE11x next year.

We gave away an iPad as part of our "Be a PagerDuty Hero contest"

We gave away a lot of t-shirts (we’re down to a few smalls and XXXL shirts left) and all of our pens, so next year we’ll bring more stuff — I don’t think I really expected over 2000 attendees at the event, all of whom needed to see James from Crash Space‘s Wiimote light-saber and OE Cake demo.

Great time, see you all in February 2013.