Today would have been the start of O’Reilly’s Infrastructure & Ops Conference 2020 in Santa Clara, California.   For those of you not familiar with the Infrastructure & Ops Conference, it was the rebranding of their Velocity Conferences.  I’ve worked booths at 5 Velocity Conferences during my time at Compuware and Fastly.  It was a Velocity Conference that was the impetus for my SE – Conference Booth Duty Is Your Friend post.  Late in March of this year that they announced they’d be closing their live conference business.  I’d like to share a bit of my experiences with those live conferences.

A Foundation in Tech Books

First we need to go down history lane and understand their roots.  It was 1984 that O’Reilly started publishing books about programming and computer technology.  I remember the computer store at our local mall had a small set of shelves with computer books.  O’Reilly made up for two of the 7 shelves.  True, they were headquartered just a few miles north in Sebastopol.  The reality was that their proximity had no influence on a chain store’s decision to stock so many different titles.  I still have a few shelves of their books.  You could always depend on the updates from edition to edition.  There were times I owned the 1st of 2nd edition and would spend the $38.95 for the next edition.  They were such a major part of my evolution in the tech space that I find it nearly impossible to recycle one of their titles.

The bookstore in their headquarters (in Sebastopol, California) was an experience.  Valhalla for a computer nerd.  Imagine a single room with a single copy of hundreds of titles they publish.  Organized by language and subject, their contribution to building the Internet is so apparent.  When I was younger they used to give you a t-shirt if you bought one of their books at the headquarters.  It was probably a quarterly event that a group of use would take a long lunch and carpool up there to see what exciting new treasure we’d find.  Of course the bookstore visit was always first before lunch.  This allowed us to browse a bit before eating and returning to work – knowing that the book would have to wait until that evening.

Tech Conferences

One of the first conferences I attended was their Perl Conference.  I don’t recall the year, and don’t need to date myself here.  But I still have the xeroxed handouts from the courses I attended and they helped me be a much better developer and IT Engineer.  The event was organized and worthwhile.

Their conferences were always a joy when it came to working a booth for my employer.  The attendees don’t see what goes on in the exhibit hall when it isn’t open yet.  Hundreds of booths, thousands of unopened boxes of gear and swag.  Just about every booth has some sort of technical need.  Big monitors, Internet access, power, lighting.  The booths were perfect and working nearly every time.  And when there were problems you could find someone fast to get things repaired or working before the floor opened.

The Future

The only constant is change.  Even though that has always been the harsh reality of tech, it is interesting to watch the changes and evolution at O’Reilly.  There are strong opinions when it comes to book publishing in tech and DRM.  Not to mention the subscription model O’Reilly is moving into with their O’Reilly online.  But there is no argument that the Internet was built Faster and Stronger with books and conferences from O’Reilly.