Get excited for LibrePlanet 2014!

I attended LibrePlanet in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the first time last year. I had a wonderful time, and I can't wait for LibrePlanet 2014, which happens in just ten days.

I expect to learn from the presentations. Last year, I learned that Mozilla had built a fully realized scalable single sign-in system that you can use in your applications -- today, immediately, possibly with just a few lines of code. With Mozilla Persona, your app doesn't have to collect and protect passwords, and no central authority ever knows who signs into what services.

My goal for this year is to learn at least two very useful things like that, which will apply directly to my work.

I expect to be inspired. Last year, I listened to Italo Vignoli explain how he and his colleagues took up the LibreOffice project, forked from OpenOffice.org, which seemed at the time to have been left out to pasture by Oracle, and injected incredible energy and momentum into the product. In just a few years, they turned a product that was almost impossible for a newbie developer to build into the community's favorite free software office suite with the best usability, not to mention being the most developer-friendly.

With this year's program including representatives from MediaWiki, Xiph.org, GNU Mailman, GNOME, and many others, there will be plenty of inspiration to go around.

Of course, I expect to have a lot of fun and interesting conversations with my friends, presenters, IRC guests who couldn't make it to Boston, and strangers who will become friends.

And with the list of keynote speakers, you know we're going to be making headlines.

See you there!

This is a guest post by Brendan Kidwell.