You might be wondering: what the heck is Shane talking about, that he loves the ASF - the Apache Software Foundation - so much? He’s built this whole website about it, and even given a number of talks about this before. It’s kind of strange to love an organization, don’t you think?

The biggest point for me is the people. The Membership of the ASF is like a great big family. While everything else about the work of the AFS is important - the public charity; the way we work via consensus, not hierarchy; the cool projects and communities and technologies; and thie history - it’s really the people that keeps me volunteering at Apache.

While plenty of committers working on different projects are just there for the code, many of the Members and evangelists for the Apache are so much more involved with the community. It’s about finding better ways for groups of people to work together on shared goals - not just improving the code, but helping all of us improve the work we do with the technology.

And giving goofy Lighting Talks at ApacheCon. (more to come!)

I’ve met a lot of great people at ApacheCon throughout the years (since 2001), and hope to see people at ApacheCon/BigData, coming to Miami, Florida this 16-18 May 2017!