PSIA General Meeting

I had a busy agenda in Manila, from which I’ve just returned. Getting a bit behind on blogging about it in fact!

During the trip, I was able to attend the PSIA (Philippine Software Industry Association) General Meeting in Makati. It was a bigger than expected turn out, and a good night out. It was interesting to see what else is going on there. I was even able to play a small role, being guest judge for a contest (based on submissions of business ideas for building intellectual property).

There were a number of presentations during the evening. Deng was one, presenting a case study on the Apache Software Foundation and it’s licensing model, which she recently blogged about.

What Deng was too modest to mention in her blog was that she was also the recipient of the PSIA Honor Award during the evening. 

The award was to recognise her achievement in being the first Filipina chair of a project at the ASF. While this is admittedly a strange thing to give an award for (it’s much more of a responsibility than a privilege!), the point was made during the presentation that Apache is a meritocracy, and there is no doubt that Deng has shown merit in her time there. Knowing Deng and the responsibility, respect and humility with which she has taken on the position makes it something worth recognising.

That sort of accolade doesn’t come along every day, so I thought it was worth a plug. Congratulations Deng!

It was certainly encouraging to me to see the organisation recognising contributions to open source at that level. Even more importantly, they gave the stage to Deng to describe to people of influence in the software industry there why they should be looking at both using and producing open source, and why Apache’s license and community development model is a good choice in doing so.

Finally, the night ended with networking, drinks, and Rock Band. After a rendition of Enter Sandman, and a compulsion to sing Australian music by Jet, I decided I should really stick to the instruments and not the vocals in public from now on.

Here are a few pictures from the evening:

Blog Moved to Exist, and WordPress

Since DevZuz was acquired by Exist , I’ve now move my blog to it’s new home. Hopefully everything redirects here now, and I’ll shortly set up Feedburner properly (finally) so that can be used to subscribe in future. I’m really liking WordPress – though Pebble treated me well, you just can’t go past the wealth of plugins that WordPress offers.

You’ll find some other DevZuz bloggers here too – as well a growing number of others from Exist.

It’s been a crazy busy start to the new year, so things have been a little quiet on this blog. I’ve spent most of my time in January in the Philippines, settling in to the new environment and having a blast with my friends and coworkers from Exist.

I’ll post some more separately on what’s been happening and what’s coming up!