Evening meal

I don’t sleep well and then I don’t enjoy the keynote. What is lovely is seeing all my old ACCU friends again.

My workshop is at 11:00. I asked for twenty handouts to be printed, but there are closer to thirty people in the room. It’s a good problem to have and the workshop unfolded really nicely. As usual the debrief after the first exercise led to lots of questions and discussion, which took up most of the remaining time. Tiring, but fun.

The lightning talks in the evening , hosted by Pete Goodliffe, were their usual mix of entertainment, education, and astonishment. I did a version of “How Long Is A Piece Of String?” in response to this morning’s keynote (got the requisite laughs). Most of the rest were regulars too.

Dom Davies did a rant on USB and Thunderbolt that built up to a parody of Bohemian Rhapsody, timed so that, as his five minutes ran out, the audience shouted “we will not let you go!” just as Pete forced him off the stage.

Rob Smallshire described Scandinavian “flight shaming” and his two day train journey from Oslo to get to the conference. Sentiment that is close to my heart and wonderful photographs.

Final mention goes to Phil Nash who had recorded a music video. Playing the tune to Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself”, he sang parody lyrics of his own devising encouraging the audience to build open source libraries themselves rather than downloading them prebuilt.

And then Austin, Rob, Jon and I head into the Bristol night in search of food. We head down to the Quay quarter, but all the hip eateries are fully booked. Instead we slip into the plush restaurant at The Bristol hotel. A lovely meal and great conversation, that only latterly turned to a technical discussion of “version control for CI artefacts”. We had a lot to catch up on.

Back at the hotel, we went to the bar for a night cap. It was great to see Jutta there - and I’ll be going to her workshop tomorrow. And Phil came to catch up with us as well. A shame that both of them are leaving tomorrow :(