Today marks the end of another great OSCON. It’s certainly been a busy week but we had a blast, learned a ton, and enjoyed our time spent with open source projects and developers from around the world. To wrap things up, here’s a recap of the event along with an update of our second annual OSCON ping pong tournament.
Hanging with our Partners
This year we reserved a big enough space to include mini booths featuring several of friends in open source. We enjoyed spending time with some of our best partners. Thanks WordPress, Drupal and phpBB for joining us!
Introducing VPS and Dedicated Hosting
We also took the opportunity to introduce the open source community to our new, next-generation VPS and dedicated hosting services, completely built on open source technology. A lot of people were excited to learn more about these new services, how we created them with leading open source solutions, and how we’re working on some exciting new features that will make our most powerful servers support open source even better in the future. In case you missed it, learn more about our new products and the open source technology behind them here.
Open Source Presentations with Bluehost Engineers
If you attended OSCON, hopefully you got the opportunity to learn from our Bluehost engineers first hand. Jared Smith, our Director of Open Source Outreach presented a discussion titled “Open Source in the Enterprise: Telecommunications and Contact Centers”. Jason Hall, one of our Principal Payment Processing Architect, gave a talk entitled “Using and Extending the Freeside Billing Toolkit.”
Supporting Code for America
For us, one of the most important parts of OSCON this year was the opportunity we had to spread the word about Code for America. Not only are we continuing our support with a donation of over $250,000, but we dedicated our keynote to addressing their mission and even invited their CTO to participate. Plus people visiting our booth could tweet about Code for America, learn more, and donate themselves. If you haven’t read up on their efforts, check out our blog post about Code for America and get involved! Contribute yourself or help your company do so, spread the word so your friends and colleagues learn about the organization, and participating whenever you can as volunteer.
Second Annual Ping Pong Tournament
As what’s quickly becoming an anticipated tradition at OSCON, we held a riveting ping pong tournament. Directed by our resident Table Tennis Pro Alfred Najem, over 22 open source fans competed. Some had played last year and certainly brought their A-game to this year’s event. Prizes included a 60″ LED Television, a Parrot® remote control drone, and even a Nexus 7 tablet!
Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone that participated!
First Place: David Su, Amazon
Second Place: Ronald Yorganson, Adaptive Computing
Third Place: Kent Bye, Puppet Labs
Committed to Open Source
The reason we sponsor OSCON is because we believe in open source. Thanks to our role as one of the world’s biggest providers of online web services, we see first hand just how big of a difference open source makes in the lives of everyday people. We feel we have a unique opportunity to not only contribute to the community directly, but to help spread awareness about open source and encourage others to get involved as well. Our CEO Dan Handy spoke this close relationship we enjoy with the open source community in an interview with Mike Hendrickson of O’Reilly Media. Check it out!
Thank you to our friends at O’Reilly Media for 15 great years of OSCON. As longtime attendees we’re thrilled to be at a point where we can directly sponsor and contribute toward this conference’s success. And a special thanks to everyone that stopped by our booth to say hi and play some ping pong!