tl;dr OSUOSL == awesome, I have am organizing C Conf and will donate part of the revenue to the OSUOSL.
I owe the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) a debt for the boost they gave to my career and I want to pay-it-forward and help other students succeed. So, I will be donating a portion of the procceeds generated from the C Conference to help someone else succeed. The rest of the proceeds will be held for future C Conf events.
What is the OSUOSL? It is a unique gem for students and Oregon State. The alumni of the OSUOSL have gone on to do great things in part due to the experience and connections they make running systems and writing code for projects and organizations like Apache, Mozilla and Kernel.org. I consider myself lucky to be one of the alumni.
My OSL Story
The OSL gave me the opportunity to work on production systems and software while I learned theory in classes. This practical experience gave me a solid start to be successful outside of school.
After graduation I was hired on by SUSE Labs via Greg KH, a well known kernel developer, who visited OSU several times as part of kernel.org work and the regular lectures he gave at our operating systems class (I later took over giving similar lectures to those classes; it was a lot of fun).
Without the experience I had at the OSUOSL I wouldn’t have passed the SUSE Labs interview exam. Thanks for giving me the leg up! Paying it forward. Feels good. Hope to see you at C Conf!
Update: I will be announcing C Conf’s date/time/location on Monday April 30th and open the reverse cfp and registration then. Update 2: C Conf announced!