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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

I've always wanted to go to a conference like this. I've been to the more industrial ones like re:Invent, which are cool, but way less in the way of actually programming and the tech. How does one find events like this near them? I'm in New England, so I assume Boston would be the spot but I have no idea where to look. What sites do people use for this? Or should I even consider taking time off of work and traveling to some of these if they're further?

I'd love to hear about other's experiences with conferences like these. They seem wonderful.

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They were a lot more popular in the 90s and early aughts when Linux was still new and people were looking for community. I usually would find out about them through local Linux User Groups (LUGs) at the time [1].

I remember a Linuxfest in 2002 in Southern Ohio (not OLF) and John "Maddog" Hall was also a keynote speaker. Looking at his speaking schedule is probably a good way to find similar events. My most distinct memory of it was someone had a table of NeXT computers setup to use.

Along with OLF, SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo) [2] is another large Linuxfest type event. Much more of a technical and casual vibe, and satisfies personally instead if professionally. I did a GPG key signing party at it once and it was a nerdy and fun as it sounds.

1. https://wiki.ohiolinux.org/index.php/History

2. https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x

I'm also in the New England area. In Boston, there's LibrePlanet, which is in March. I went for the first time this year; it was a lot of fun.

I'm still trying to figure out if I'll fly out to Columbus for OLF this year. I went last year and the year before. It's worth the travel to me, but I have a flexible schedule. The talks are good, but the people are the real reason to go. A lot of the people who go to these conferences work on really interesting stuff. There are of course also big names like maddog and Doug McIlroy.

Probably more Meetups than larger and more formally-organized volunteer-events. As the sibling notes, there used to be more along those lines in the Boston area in the late 80s/90s but a lot of the more grassroots type of conferences have tended to fade out over time. (And I suspect COVID--and tightening of tech budgets--killed some more that were holding out mostly on the basis of momentum.)

DevOps Days is still around and there's a Boston one this year although I haven't been to one of those for a few years.

https://confs.tech/ has a decent crowd-sourced list

Philadelphia holds fosscon every year. Also a cheap conference, laid back, non corporate

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