MacTech Day 1
My MacTech experience started last night. I flew into Los Angeles and was picked up at the airport by my coworker, Zack Smith. Given that I lived in Santa Monica for over a decade, I drove the Mini Cooper that 318 bought recently from LAX to Studio City. On the way, I got to get caught up with Zack’s stories from a month of vacation (living vicariously through others definitely has its moments).
We got to the Universal City Sheraton in less than an hour during rush hour. Given the 405 being all messed up, we dodged a few bullets and cut through South Central Los Angeles on our way to the valley (my apologies to the 2 or 3 guys I ran over when passing the needle exchange at Highland and Romaine). I have to give it to the Sheraton: we were checked in and back downstairs on our way to dinner within 10 minutes. We had dinner at Wasabi and were back at the hotel bar within about an hour, and that’s when the conference began in earnest for me.
In the hotel bar, I ran into friends from conferences past and met new people as well. We discussed refining upcoming presentations, deploying iOS in Lion Server-based environments and troubleshooting various problems with Lion Server. It was just the kind of evening that causes my wife to not travel to conferences with me any more, but an evening that I really enjoyed.
Luckily, I was in bed by midnight (due to a bit too much caffeine I didn’t actually fall asleep ’till after 4, but I did manage to write at least 3 scripts and a chapter of a book in my head, none of which made any sense when I woke up). The next day I woke up, ran through mine and Zack’s presentations with him and started the day with a great keynote by Guy Kawasaki. His take on Apple, innovation and lessons he learned while there contained at least a few insights I can’t wait to bring home and implement at 318.
Next, I sat it on James Wilson’s presentation. Despite technical difficulties, James was able to explain sanely integrating gestures into iOS applications better than I have heard of it to date. I was also really excited that my 3 year old isn’t the only toddler who has mastered the iPad!
Then I got to sit through a great presentation by Randy Saeks and Justin Rummel. They covered changes to Lion Server. I was a bit disappointed reading the tweets through that presentation from people that don’t see themselves having a future with Lion Server. I find that despite a few flaws, Lion Server is a new, interesting perspective that has a chance to innovate the future of servers. I thought Justin and Randy did a great job with the presentation and look forward to seeing more from them at MacWorld in January.
At 318, we’ve developed a tool that allows our customers to sign work orders from an iPad. I ended up getting to also sit through a presentation by Justin Esgar, the man behind SignMyPad, which I guess I could have used instead of building our own (taking a page out of his outsourcing slides). I learned of a few new sites to leverage for crowd sourcing and social networking, always useful.
Then Zack went on. And as usual, I was reminded of why he’s one of my favorite people ever. He managed to teach a number of complicated ideas in a presentation on Cocoa development for SysAdmins. While Zack only had a limited amount of time, I thought he did a good job of keeping the attention of the audience, making people laugh and imparting some complicated technical concepts all at the same time: public speaking skills made to be emulated. Zack showed a bit more of the 318 internal code than I was expecting, but given that most of it is bound for open source projects, it’s timely to do so!
The last talk of the day was Scott Neil, who took the stage to talk about automating tasks and scripting in OS X. There were examples in a number of different languages and as usual, Scott did a great job (thanks for the mention, btw)! At night, we were able to network, meeting lots of new people (many of whom we’ve been interacting with in various social networks). Everyone else went off to the tour of Universal while I stayed behind and worked on fine tuning my presentation.
MacTech Day 2
The next day had a lot of content as well. It kicked off with Greg Neagle, looking at doing Software Update services without OS X Server, a topic I’ve been looking into a lot for OS X, Mac App Store and iOS App Store. Then Rich Trouton did a great job covering FileVault 2 and looking a bit past the article that he published in MacTech last month.
After that, the Google guys took the stage to look at weaponizing Munki for the masses using Simian Server, which I had missed at MacWorld last year because I was in the same speaking slot as them. It was great to see what they’re doing and what parts could be borrowed into a Managed Services type of environment. Then I got to see Harald Wagener do Life After the Xserve. Having done some articles for MacTech with a slightly different take on this topic, it was great to see that others are looking at which services that require rack density can or should be moved to other platforms.
After lunch, Zach Williams did a great talk on version control. He has a command line ledger. I mean, how cool is that?!?! Then Larry Jordan gave a good talk about media and IT. His history of where various video idiosyncrasies comes from was entertaining to say the least (good, clean, old school video humor, if there is such a thing, is hard to come by!).
Then Nathan Toups did a great talk on building up a good sysadmin team (good to see how important documentation is to others) and Harald Monihart, one of the smartest guys I’ve had the opportunity to meet in a long time, showed some of his great work in doing something similar to what we’ve been doing, thin imaging with self-service-style overlays to automate the final piece of user setups. Really great stuff. Allen Hancock then gave a talk near and dear to my heart (and wallet) on managed services and freeing oneself from the hourly mindset.
Finally, Gary Larizza gave a great presentation about mCollective. A picture of me made a small cameo in his presentation. As usual, his demos were spot on and his presentation skills prove that even if you break all the rules for color schemes and amount of content per slide (per Guy Kawasaki at least), that presentation skills and technical chops trump parlor tricks. My talk was last and went pretty well (it’s amazing just how much rehearsing a presentation helps).
MacTech Day 3
On the last day the developers and systems administrators joined up in the same room and watched presentations from Jan Monsh on OS X Security, Daniel Jalkut (of Red Sweater Software) on effectively bypassing the Mac App Store for developers and then I kinda’ got pulled in a lot of different directions and had to miss the next two. I did, though, get to sit in on the Code42 talk, covering the new CrashPlan PROe software. All I can say about that is that the new PROe stuff is just awesome. The ability to automate clustering and unclustering of CrashPlan servers alone is one of the coolest features I’ve seen, and the simplicity with which new nodes are added is pretty unparalleled in enterprise-class scalable solutions of this type. And the fact that you can decommission nodes as easily as they are added to the cluster is pretty rad as well.
Then I got home to the cold and got super-busy on a bunch of other stuff, before attending the JAMF User Conference here in Minneapolis, which is why this is a bit delayed. I had the luck of attending MacSysAdmin a few weeks ago and I wish I had written up a long diatribe about that as well. But it is really the combination of the 3 that has me being so verbose here. You see, MacTech is one of three and happened to be the one I was taking notes at during the show. But being able to see the number of people writing code, cranking out scripts, figuring out how to make little things work in OS X Server, regression testing, charting new courses for 1-to-1 deployments and just being awesome people all around that has me thinking that in the +10 years that I’ve been a pretty active member of the Apple community that we have never had this massive a talent pool before.
And the talent is interwoven and interconnected, due to the various social networking mediums, in ways that I have never seen before for any platform. The next few years will be interesting times. Armed with the super powers that these types of events are giving systems administrators, I think that more tools are going to be coming out in a much higher frequency than ever before. People like Greg Neagle, the good folks at JAMF software and others are posting more, github’ing more and in general putting more information out in the community than ever before, and this information is being digested in ways that are more far reaching and even competitive in some ways than I’ve seen within the Apple community.
My talk at MacTech revolved around the changing dynamic between iOS and Mac OS X, looking at a potential unification of the operating systems. It is a good thing that the pool of talent is now so large. We’re going to need a lot of new tools to meet the deployment, integration and management challenges that iOS will pose to our community over the upcoming 5 years, as the zenith of the Mac community is hopefully eclipsed by the community of an increasingly iOS-centric world. Now, I’m looking forward to MacWorld and the introduction of their new MacIT conference, coming up in January in San Francisco. Hope to see you there!
Hopefully, I’ll be able to see you at all of the conferences in the future. You really can’t go wrong with MacIT, MacTech, MacSysAdmin or any of the others that are spinning up. But if you can’t attend, you can often access slides and videos. The MacTech slides, being posted recently at http://www.mactech.com/conference/presentations-speaker.
