Harlan and Margaret have returned from #scale20x, the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America. The picture of the Network Time Foundation booth (taken before the expo opened) belies the amount of traffic the booth received. Both were pleasantly surprised at the diversity of those who stopped by–-from gender to age to location (with attendees from every continent, except Antartica).

Despite the late hour for the Network Time Foundation BoF session, they were a fair number of attendees and the discussions lasted well past the allotted time. Topics included navigation at the equator (fascinating fact: if your clock is off by a second at the equator, your position is off by a nautical mile), the general timestamp API (interesting fact: the host id is important as some info about time corrections is only known on the local host), and why there is no clear simple answer to “how many sources of upstream time should I have?”.

Harlan gave a lightning talk presentation, providing an overview of Network Time Foundation and the projects it supports. A PDF of the slides is available. We’ll post a link to the video once it becomes available.

We’d like to give a big thank you to everyone who donated to the Foundation during this event.

This was the first year that Network Time Foundation attended SCaLE and it won’t be the last. We were impressed by the professionalism and friendliness of the SCaLE volunteer staff and the diversity of the attendees, and look forward to next year.