Conversation the last night of OSCON, reconstructed from memory:

"So, Neil Young --"
"The singer-songwriter?"
"Yeah."
"Man, what a white guy name."
"Are you impugning Neil Young? That man sells organic eggs at the farmer's market in my hometown!"
"Are you sure they're organic? You sure he doesn't just get them from Sysco?"
"Sysco doesn't even sell organic eggs."
"Uh, actually Sysco does sell organic eggs."
"Yeah right. I bet it's, like, orgänic, with an umlaut, so it can get around the FDA rules on calling things 'organic'."
"Yeah, and that's also how they get around the rules on Appellation Contrôlée."
"Anyway, Neil Young has a son who really likes model trains, and so he does model train stuff, and he actually has multiple patents related to model trains."
"Patents? Is he part of the Open Invention Network? Is this a defensive patent portfolio against Big Train?"
"You mean Supertrain?"

In honor of late-night wackiness, I have not actually fact-checked whether Neil Young has any model train patents, or whether he or Sysco sell organic eggs. Caveat lector et caveat emptor.

My last visit to OSCON was in 2011, when I had worked for the Wikimedia Foundation for under a year, and wanted to build and strengthen relationships with the MediaWiki and PHP communities. I remember not feeling very successful, and thinking that this was a conference where executives and engineers (who in many cases are not terribly emotionally passionate about open source) meet to hire, get hired, and sell each other things.

These days, it turns out, OSCON is basically aimed at me! Because I am an executive trying to sell my services (e.g. get hired on an as-needed basis) to engineers and executives who make or depend on open source -- including the passionate ideologues, the burned-out used-to-be-passionate folks, the pragmatists, and all manner of other types. Changeset Consulting was novel, relevant, and interesting to approximately everyone I spoke with. Also, in the intervening five years, I've grown in skill, stature, reputation, and network. So I had something interesting to say, and O'Reilly accepted a talk proposal of mine for the first time. I saw scores of acquaintances, friends, peers, and colleagues in the halls and session rooms this year; I know and am known, which helps me feel at home.

I'm grateful to Audra Montenegro at O'Reilly Media for her speaker support. She worked with O'Reilly to cover my flight plus two hotel nights in Austin, making it possible for me to attend OSCON. She and other O'Reilly folks paid and worked with White Coat Captioning to provide CART (live captions) for my talk, at my request. And I was concerned that talking about inessential weirdnesses and inclusivity in open source upped my risk of harassment, so she arranged for some extra security for me. I'm also grateful to Andy Oram, my session chair, for his careful pre-conference prep (including checking on my pronouns -- she/her, thanks!), and for running a written Q&A session at my request.

I shall carry with me several memories of this OSCON, such as:

• Breaking the no-electronics rule of the quiet room/relaxation lounge (since I was the only one using it) to finish revising my talk and blog about good code review
• Staying with some lovely relatives in the suburbs for a few days and drinking spinach juice with them each morning (my uncle is in charge of making it, and sometimes he adds grape or orange juice, and sometimes something else, and sometimes it's just spinach. It's a surprise. "Every day's a new day," he said to me)
• Helping my high schooler cousin revise a skit, and deploying my stand-up comedy wisdom, e.g., use over-the-top worshipful admiration as a kinder substitute for straight-up mockery
• Being the only person in the pool at the Software Freedom Conservancy party (foolish choice on my part; it was pretty cold)
• Meditating on a loved one during an exercise in Cate Huston's talk on technical interviewing, and feeling the lovingkindness throughout the whole room
• Listening to an enthralling performance by rapper Sammus
• Discussing pull request workflow, Contributor Licensing Agreements, the engagement funnel, the future of OpenHatch and of Apache Zookeeper, the failings of Google Summer of Code, whether GitHub should allow no-license repositories, how Facebook/Amazon/Google's idiosyncrasies come out in their open source work, performing femininity in the workplace, productivity and routines, effectively signalling to one's employees that they should not work on weekends, what maintainership is, JavaScript and data binding, and BLESS
• Becoming increasingly convinced that continuous integration/continuous delivery is hitting an inflection point that source control hit several years ago, i.e., soon it will be a must-have for software-making communities and not having it will be embarrassing
• Chatting with OSCON acquaintances in an Austin hotel lobby and being interrupted by a drunk white woman who called me "Mindy Lahiri" (a fictional character from The Mindy Project)
• Opting out of the millimeter-wave scanner at the Austin airport and witnessing a person wearing an EFF shirt not opt out!

But here's a conversation that I particularly find stays with me. I was on the expo floor, talking with an acquaintance, and a stranger joined our conversation. I'll anonymize this recollection and call him Cyclopes.

He heard about the consulting services I offer, which focus on short-term project management and release management for open source projects and for companies that depend on them -- maintainership-as-a-service, in short.

Cyclopes: "Can you come to my company and tell us that the way we're doing deployments is all wrong, and tell them we should do it my way?"
Sumana: "Well, if your company hires me, and I assess how you're doing deployments and I think it's wrong, and I agree with the approach you want, then yes."
Cyclopes: "Great!" [explains his preferred deployment workflow, with justification, and says that it's like bashing his head against a brick wall for him to try to convince the rest of his company to do it]
Sumana: [lightheartedly] "So it sounds like what you really want is more a sockpuppet or an actor! Which might be cheaper!"
Cyclopes: "Hmmmm! You know, that is kind of what I want!"
[we three jest about this]
Sumana: "But, in all seriousness, like, you could go aboveboard with this. You know, you have options -- fraud and deception, or actually trying to persuade the other people in your org .... or, this is a wild guess, have you kind of burned bridges by being really abrasive, and now they won't listen to you?"
Cyclopes: "Yeaaaaaaaaah that might be what's happened."
Sumana: "OK! That totally happens and you weren't the first and you won't be the last."
Cyclopes: "Like, I've sent some pretty flame-y emails."
[acquaintance nods in sad agreement; we are all sinners here]
Sumana: "Oh man, the emails I've sent. I am so embarrassed when I look back. But you can come back from this. You really can. If you demonstrate to those people in your org that you really want to repair those relationships with them, they will respond. Like, if you say to them, 'I know I burned bridges before, I'm sorry about it, can we talk about this problem,' and you actually try to listen to them about what they need and what their context is, what they're worried about and what problems they're trying to solve, they will work with you, so you can figure out something that works for everybody. There's a book about this, about negotiation, that's a really short, quick read, it helped me a lot: Getting to Yes by Fisher and Ury."
Cyclopes: "Let me write this down." [notes book title and author on the back of my business card]
Sumana: "There you go, some free consulting for you. It's totally possible."
Cyclopes: "I think I could use that, I'm ripe for that kind of personal transformation in my life."
Sumana: "Great! Please, seriously, let me know how it works out."

Memory is unreliable, but I cannot forget the speed of my diagnosis, nor that this guy literally said that he was ripe for the kind of personal transformation I was prescribing. It's no model train patent but I think I'm happy anyway.