5-8 Nov, Sinsheim (Germany): our staff's experience at their first ASF conference
RHEIN-NECKAR ARENA, SINSHEIM (Germany) - The tale of a very enthusiastic week for all of the Tirasa staff begins on Sunday 4th with an unexpectedly long journey to reach up the place where the ApacheCon EU 2012 conference would have started the day after.
The hackathon 
First of all, the hackaton: think about a crowdy, large (but never enough) room stuffed with geeks talking, skyping, tweeting, developing, discussing, etc; now take this for hours and you would get a rather pale idea of what the hackaton experience has been, especially about Syncope and Cocoon, the projects we feature the most within the ASF.
The talks
Literally, an avalanche of incredibly interesting topics, raging from Big Data to Web Infrastructure, from Solr to Enterprise software. Even an old fellow like Cocoon had some relevant place in Thorsten Scherler's and Simone Tripodi's presentations.
We also had the honor to be part of this with our presentation about Open Source Identity Management (slides and video available at the end of page).
The evenings
Yeah, it was Germany, hence beer all evenings, either at one of very valuable meetups or privately in one of several pubs around the city.
Last evening we had the chance to meet Tirasa's Spanish twin, codeBusters: same team size, same Open Source minding, same troubles with inside-team brewers and smokers... we also planned a beach-volley match for next summer!
Farewell
Again a long trip - maybe a bit shorter than for people coming from India, USA or South America - for finally getting home.
A very positive and learning experience, the confirmation that building a community comes first than simply building some source code.
Looking forward to the next one!
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