From August 15th to 17th FromDual will have an Advanced MySQL Developer Workshop with Citrus in Helsinki (Finland). The workshop will be held in English. The workshop topics you can find here and the registration form is available here.

… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the …

This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.

Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use.

For me, this was a tremendous help - I’ve been putting off working on this for Foo Associates for some months now. It is much easier to work on meeting the needs of customers than it is to work on planning for the future.

The notes are still extremely rough, but both Monty and I want to post them so that people can discuss. Also, …

I’ll be attending the Openmind conference from October 2nd to 3rd and will be giving a keynote at the event.

Openmind is being organized by COSS, an interesting Finnish Free Software and Open Source development agency that helps Finnish and Scandinavian businesses and projects use and develop FLOSS.

Other keynote presenters at the event (that readers of this blog may know) include Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems AS and FLOSS researcher Rishab Aiyer Gosh.

I also hoping that since Monty is in the area, he will also be able to attend.

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