5 Developers Explain Why They Attend ApacheCon

ApacheCon North America and Apache Big Data are coming up in just a few weeks and it’s an event that Apache and open source community members won’t want to miss.

Apache products power half the Internet, manage exabytes of data, execute teraflops of operations, store billions of objects in virtually every industry, and enhance the lives of countless users and developers worldwide. And behind those projects is a thriving community of more than 4,500 committers from around the world.

ApacheCon, the annual conference of The Apache Software Foundation, is the place where all of those users and contributors can meet to collaborate on the next generation of cloud, Internet, and big data technologies.

Here, five attendees of last year’s ApacheCon and Apache Big Data, explain how they benefitted from the conference.

1. Learn from experienced developers

“You meet the best people around the globe who share the same passion for software and sharing. It’s great listening to experienced senior programmers and the interesting use cases they have been solving.” – Yash Sharma, a contributor to Apache Drill, Apache Calcite, and a committer to Apache Lens.

2. Reach consensus faster

“You’re able to meet with some of the folks and talk about things that may take more time than on the (mailing) lists. You’re able to exchange ideas before bringing them to the community. Face to face can have a huge impact on attitude and interaction moving forward. Sometimes it’s tough to put tone in email, so it’s good to share in a personal manner.” – Jeff Genender, who is involved in several Apache projects including Camel, CXF, ServiceMix, Mina, TomEE, and ActiveMQ.

3. Meet your ecosystem partners

“I had the opportunity to talk with committers and PMC members of other projects that are built on top of Apache jclouds. At the time of ApacheCon we had to make some unpopular decisions such as dropping support for unmaintained providers, or rejecting some pull requests that had little hope to progress, and one of the objectives I had was to directly discuss with the jclouds ecosystem which impact that could have, how the projects could collaborate better, and how we could better align our roadmaps.” – Ignasi Barrera, Chair of Apache jclouds.

4. Explore other open source projects

“For me ApacheCon is all about community. I met so many great people, had a lot of thoughtful conversations, and heard about dozens of very interesting projects I had no idea existed.” – Andriy Redko, who participates in Apache CXF.

5. Meet your family

“Only after the ApacheCon did I understand the real power of Apache. For me, before ApacheCon it was just a group of geeks who try to write awesome code to make the world a better place, but now I feel like I’m a member of a huge family who cares very much for each other. It was like, what it seems to be a code base became home for me and now I’m not just trying to improve the code base but rather to make the family bigger in every aspect.” – Dammina Sahabandu, who’s involved in Apache Bloodhound.

ApacheCon North America and Apache Big Data take place May 11-13 in Vancouver, B.C.