Despite on-call duty and a hung over boyfriend we both managed to visit Slackathon 2008 at the University of Stockholm yesterday, at least for a few hours. We showed up at Slackathon around 4 pm, about four hours after most people… For those of you that don’t know what Slackthon is it’s an OpenBSD event with speeches, OpenBSD hackers, other geeks, OpenBSD clothes and ofcourse lots of coffee, coke and beer.

While there we met some old friends together with some people from the IRC channel #data.se @ FreeNode we never met before. Over all it was a nice afternoon even though my beeper beeped after three speeches and we had to leave again. During the few hours we attendend this event we got to see speeches from Thordur I. Bjornsson who talked about the OpenBSD 4.4 Release and about OpenBSD’s almost unique six months development cycle and Owain Ainsworth who talked about new features in the new X.org.

Most impressive of the three speeches we managed to attend was by far Reyk Floeter’s speech about recent advances in relayd which is a load balancer on layer 3 and 7. My network-hacking boyfriend was pretty close to drooling over this neat feature and he was sure happy that the food was late so we didn’t have to stick around until 9 pm to attend this presentation.

Even though we had to leave early due to broken Mac servers at my work and my assistance was needed it was a nice afternoon together with around 50 other geeks. One of the high points of the event was that I got myself a real sweet OpenBSD-hoodie to wear at work. :)

More info about Slackathon 2008 can be found at http://www.slackathon.se:2008