[yocto] [OE-core] OE Summit report from SCaLE17x

[akuster808]

Trevor,

Thank you for leading this effort. Its much appreciated.


On 3/15/19 7:27 AM, Trevor Woerner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Earlier this week I got back from SCaLE17x during which I taught an E-ALE
> class on Buildroot, was a TA for the other E-ALE classes, organized and ran
> the first ever (hopefully of more to come) OE Summit, and gave a general intro
> talk on OE. I wasn't planning on giving an OE talk at SCaLE, but the person
> who was supposed to talk wasn't able to make it. I had travelled to SCaLE with
> a backup talk prepared as a "plan B", and it was good that I did.
>
> I'm quite happy with how the inaugural OpenEmbedded Summit went. Everything
> went off without a hitch, and there was a lot of interaction and feedback
> between the speakers and the audience.
>
> We had 4 speakers:
>
> 	myself (Togan Labs): Using OE
> 	Drew Moseley (mender.io): Mechanisms for Enabling and Configuring WiFi in OE
> 	Alistair Francis (Western Digital): RISC-V and OE
> 	Jon Mason (ARM): Kernel Development Workflows Using OE
Thank you all for participating in the first ever OE Summit.

Kind regards,
Armin
>
> Counting attendance is a bit tricky because people sometimes wander in and
> out. Do we count someone who wanders in partway through but leaves before the
> end? My talk was the least attended. I forgot to count the audience members
> (since I was giving the talk), but I did notice that a couple people wandered
> in during the talk. Behan counted 12; like I said, I didn't think to get a
> specific number myself. In any case, my talk wasn't in the programme, since I
> was filling in for someone who didn't make it to the conference. Drew's and
> Jon's talks had roughly 20 audience members each, and Alistair's talk was
> about 30.
>
> It's too bad the OE Summit was pitted against SCaLE's "Embedded Track". I
> think we ended up "competing" for audience members between the two of us. The
> OE Summit was put in a rather large room. Between teaching and helping out
> with E-ALE and running the OE Summit, I didn't attend a single talk at the
> conference nor spend time in any other part of the conference except for
> these two rooms (which were beside each other). I have been told anecdotally,
> however, that the attendance numbers we saw for the OE Summit were in-line
> with the numbers of attendees for several of the other talks, but I can't
> comment personally.
>
> As we were still setting up for my OE talk, the very first talk of the OE
> Summit, one of the audience members put up his hand and asked what the
> difference is between "Yocto" and "OE". We weren't specifically prepared to
> comment off-the-cuff about the relationship between the two projects; it's not
> as if we had a prepared statement to read on the topic. We tried to fumble
> through a satisfactory answer while remaining as neutral as possible on the
> topic. But it sure would be great if the two projects could get together and
> put out an official statement on the matter to which we could point all such
> curious people. Interestingly enough, this person was sure that The Yocto
> Project pre-dated OE, which we had to correct. Then he assumed these were
> two projects that had simply forked from each other at some point in the
> past. It was probably actually more confusing to him that OE and YP are
> two separate projects, but with almost all the same developers, working on
> almost all the same code. In any case, The Yocto Project's Community Manager
> was on-hand, thankfully, and I don't think he had any objections to any of
> the things we said in answering this question.
>
> My talk was a general introduction talk about OE, but all the other talks
> assumed the audience knew something about OE. This turned out to not be the
> case. Pretty much all the speakers had to field questions along the lines of
> "so what is OE anyway?". Sadly, in many cases, saying "it's like Buildroot" is
> often what would help the person asking the question the most. I think it's
> noteworthy that more people seem to know what Buildroot is, but not OE/YP.
> Although I realize this is just one conference, and a very small sample set,
> so it wouldn't be fair to generalize from these numbers. But it is true that
> these are the sorts of questions we were frequently asked, so it's noteworthy
> in that respect.
>
> Oddly enough, when I was finished the slides portion of the Buildroot class,
> the very first statement a student made was to complain about how terribly
> difficult Yocto is to learn and use. Why this came up in a class about
> Buildroot is confusing to me too, maybe he looked me up online and found my
> affiliation with OE? I don't know. I was careful to not mention the words "OE"
> or "Yocto" at all in my Buildroot talk. In any case, in his opinion, using
> Yocto requires a masters degree. Obviously he's exaggerating for effect.
>
> I'd like to personally thank the speakers who agreed to give a talk at a
> conference that didn't exist prior to last weekend, who worked hard on their
> talks, and who put together some very interesting presentations. I think we
> all walked away having learned a bit more about OE. I'd like to thank Behan
> and Tom King who helped organize. Behan who setup his recording equipment to
> record the talks (just in case there's an issue with SCaLE's recordings).
> SCaLE who hosted the mini-conference and helped with advertising (i.e. putting
> up a page and re-tweeting). I'd like to thank the OE Board of Directors who
> gave me permission to create and run a mini-conference on their behalf.
> Finally, but not lastly, I'd like to thank everyone who attended!
>
> Thank you, and best regards,
>     Trevor