Conference networking

Today was the first full day of the AFS and Kerberos Best Practices Workshop, and while there wasn't a tremendous amount in the program itself I wasn't already aware of, the discussions before and after dinner were fantastic. I had a long talk with Sam Hartman about a whole bunch of things, interspersed with discussions with other folks, and then after the dinner a bunch of us stuck around and told war stories, talked about software licensing, and shared interesting ideas.

This is what I love most about this conference. It's one of the few where I feel like I manage to do a lot of social networking and get a lot of really useful work-related things hashed out. It's the best opportunity I have to talk to a bunch of people who are doing fundamentally the same stuff and who care about fundamentally the same things as I do; it reminds me of the heyday of Cartel, but with a lot more variety in the attendees.

We also had a very productive OpenAFS Elders lunch and a good Q&A session at dinner. I'm still nervous about the long-term future of AFS a little just because I see so many ways in which it could be better and we're clearly resource-starved, but I'm also really happy with how things are progressing and can see a lot of great opportunities.

Tomorrow, I have two talks of my own and some of the material I'm very interested in will start (in particular, Sam Hartman's web authentication talk).