LinuxCon Europe has been buzzing with energy and lively ideas ever since its kickoff on Monday morning. As day two sessions wound down and everyone was gearing up for the much-anticipated Intel-sponsored reception at Gaudi’s Casa Batillo, we took a few moments to check in with attendees. They told us what’s inspiring them at this year’s conference—and how they’ll funnel that inspiration into action when they return to their workplaces next week.

What has been your favorite session at LinuxCon so far?

“The Mostly Sunny keynote was fantastic. Dave Engberg, the CTO of Evernote, spoke about why they’ve stayed in-house and haven’t gone to the cloud. He stressed the importance of knowing your costs and making smart business decisions. Our university hasn’t gone to the cloud yet, and cost is one of the reasons. But Engberg also spoke about special use cases—like what to do when you want to turn on 100 VMs—and he made me think differently about what we might bring to the cloud in the future.”

            —Kathy Reid

Deakin University
Australia

“There have been so many great sessions, but my favorite was The Kernel Report by Jon Corbet. As the editor at LWN.net, he had lots of relevant information to share. There are so many developments in the kernel community throughout the year, and it’s hard for me to follow them all myself. I was able to go to this session and get the big picture, and I’ll use the information to help me make the right decisions when I return to work.”

            —Esben Haabendal

Prevas A/S
Denmark

“I likedthe Enlightenment session, Preparing the Scalable Desktop Environment. I already use ELF and I wanted to learn more. I liked their new ideas about the implementation of libraries and frameworks. I was also interested in their idea of having implementations fully integrated into libraries and Windows Manager.

—Samuel Flores

Elive
Belgium

“I loved the Linux at the Forefront keynote. It was given by Brian Stevens, the CTO of Red Hat. The session was so crowded that people were sitting on the floor, and everyone was really tuned in to what he was saying. He took a complicated subject and broke it down in a way that was really easy to understand. His PowerPoint was so accurate and succinct—he gave us everything we needed to know, and he really engaged with everyone in the audience.”

—Alba Carceles

Sants 3 Radio
Barcelona

“I came for the crowd. To talk. To make connections. I’m part of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries development team, so I also came to learn what people want more of in our project. We hosted an EFL Developer Day on Monday, met all kinds of developers, and swapped ideas about the project.”

            —Tom Hacochen

Enlightenment Foundation Libraries
England