This was the third time I was visiting WHD. I could freely say that the format of this event doesn’t change over the years. It’s neither worse nor better.

My daughter asked me to bring a big car (pink) from Germany as a gift. I’m not successful in the lottery, but this time was different. I was applied to the lottery to win huge Lego (Batman’s car - unfortunately black). Guess what happened. A few hours later I got an email:

Dear Donatas,
Thank you for joining our prize draw today. You have won the 1st prize the Lego Batman Tumbler!
Congratulations on behalf of the Dell EMC Team.

So, it can’t be unsuccessful every time, it was my day - perhaps first time (or second) I won something in my history.

• One of the most interesting stuff was Intel Optane memory, which could be used as a storage or could be extended as DRAM.

• Imunify360 told inotify() sucks. I could correct this: it already does not suck anymore since FAN_MODIFY_DIR flag was introduced for fanotify() syscall, which reports all events per directory basis and does it recursively.

• Litespeed promoted his product honestly with unknown benchmarks. In short comparing with Nginx, Apache Litespeed overruns aforementioned in all aspects including caching, balancing, etc. I asked how did you achieve these results, what kind of secrets you are using to obviously wake those benchmarks. I could, of course, ask if you are using some kind of low-level micro performance optimizations like pointer tagging, but I just stopped myself from asking tech questions to marketing and/or sales guys. It would be too much offending, IMO. TLDR: this sounds more like “LittleSpeed”.

• DNS RPZ is trending as an additional layer of protection for DNS. This looks promising, but still in progress. Some of the well-known DNS servers have support (e.g. PowerDNS, Bind), but it would take some time to be RFC’ed globally.

• Connection party was awesome. It really exceeded my expectations including live music concert with top music stars like ZZ Top, Black Sabbath, Guns N’ Roses, etc.

• The last day as usually was dedicated to attractions, but unfortunately most of the coasters didn’t work, despite perfect weather conditions.

To conclude all these things: it’s an amazing place to meet new people which have a lot of attractions, free parties, free food and drinks, a lot of fun and so on and so on. Just relax and enjoy the spring with some background of spam in the middle of nowhere (Rust, Germany) 🙂