I’ve never been to a tech conference before

I’ve been pushing myself both in my career and in my personal growth, so a tech conference seemed like a good place to accomplish both.

I’ve spent the last year or so looking for good candidates for my first conference. My two main blockers: location and price. While I found lots of great conferences, many were to far away or were pretty expensive. Then I found my golden goose, the SCALE conference held annually in Pasadena, CA! Both fairly affordable (with a coupon code) and only 15 minutes away from me!

This conference happened to fall right in between a slight sickness, a looming minor surgery, and my dad’s birthday. Nonetheless, I decided to press on and attend my first ever conference!

SCALE?

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is all about Linux and free open source software (FOSS), which I’ve recently become interested in. The conference hosts several speakers from companies that develop open source software as well as a few big tech companies (Meta, Apple).

Going in, I wasn’t sure how large the conference was going to be due to the limited social media posts and photos online. I was a bit worried it was going to be fairly small and local, but I was pleasantly surprised at how large it was!

Panels

The conference offers several panel options per time slot, so choices had to be made. I spent a couple of hours before the event choosing which ones I would be most interested in. Several time slots were left as a game time decision, as I just couldn’t decide between all the options.

The panels I ended up going to were:

Saturday

• Keynote: Privacy’s Defender - Fighting Digital Surveillance for over Thirty Years by Cindy Cohn
• AT: The Billion-Edge Open Social Graph by Alex Garnett
• The Intersectionality of Human Psychology, Security, and The Era of AI and Misinformation by Autumn Nash
• The -ization of Containerization by John Logan

Sunday - Open Source Career Day

• How to Succeed in Professional Open Source by Joshua Drake (JD)
• Try to Teach a Goldfish to Bark by Khewna Dawar
• Meet, Greet, Repeat. Networking Skills for Maximum Impact by Michelle Brenner

All the panels were great and I really wanted to give a spotlight to the Keynote and the AT Panel.

The Keynote

The Keynote speaker was Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), and a civil liberties lawyer. The talk was super engaging and covered a few key legal court cases Cindy took part in such as Bernstein v. United States and Hepting v. AT&T. These are some incredibly important legal cases in the tech sector in the US, and Cindy imparted some wisdom on the ever-growing fight for privacy and digital rights. She has a new book coming out soon, Privacy’s Defender, that I will definitely be checking out.

This was a great start to my experience at the conference and I wish I could have made it to the other Keynotes!

AT: The Billion-Edge Open Social Graph

This panel was well put together, with concise slides, interesting talking points, some live examples, and a engaging Q&A at the end. I was already interested in ATProto and BlueSky, so I had some context already on the topics covered, but the presentation covered all the basics so it was understandable to newcomers as well.

If I had to put together a conference session, this would be the one I would model it after.

Expo Hall

Finding time for the Expo Hall was a bit tough! It’s very easy to get lost in all the choices at this expo, which is a good thing! It’s a great way to find new companies and talk to some reps and members.

One of the standout booths here was for a local meetup group, SoCalPython. I had a great conversation with the people there! I also found out about two Python conferences this year, one being in Long Beach, CA and the other still to be announced. I just missed the window for financial aid for the Long Beach convention, PyCon 2026, but I’m hoping to be able to make it next year!

Overall Feelings, Post-Conference

I walked away from this conference having met a ton of great people and learning a lot about the FOSS landscape. This is a conference that I can see my self going to every year. The price was very reasonable ($40 - $50), the location is close by, and I had a lot of fun! If anyone is in the Los Angeles area and looking for conferences, this one should be at the top of your list!