LISA '11: William LeFebvre on 25 Years of LISA

William LeFebvre has been using Unix since 1983 and attended his first LISA in 1993 (LISA VII) in Monterey. Since then, William has attended every LISA, with the exception of 2007 and 2008. "I have been a participant in most LISAs," he says. "I was on the program committee in 1994, 1996, 1997, 2007, and 2009. I was the coordinator for the network track in 2000 and 2003. I was IT co-ordinator in 2005, and I was the program chair for the 2006 conference."

William has taught tutorials and been a guru at many of the conferences through the years. This year, he'll be teaching the Using Amazon Web Services training with Marc Staveley.

"I was a participant in the first Advanced Topics Workshop (1995) and every ATW since then through 2005," he says. "I will be returning to the ATW again this year."

William recalls that in the early years the primary focus of the conference was on the papers, saying, "We received so many submissions that paper selection was a very difficult task. We only had a fixed number of slots and an excess of good papers to fill them. There was only one invited talks track competing with the paper presentations."

In recent years, attendee interest in the papers has waned, according to William, but he says the LISA organizers have adapted. "We now provide two IT tracks and a guru track. Recent committees have found it necessary to reduce the number of paper presentations because there just aren't enough good papers to fill all the slots. This shift is really a reflection of the changes in the industry."

William says that use of Unix and its variants has moved out from academia to the corporations, and most corporations don't want to publish their techniques and findings because they consider them trade secrets. "As Unix has matured, we see less reason to innovate, and fewer publishable papers," he explains.

William has several favorite LISA memories. "The power outage during LISA VIII (1994) was very memorable, but that's probably not the kind of moment you were looking for," he recalls. "The talk in 2002 by Jim Reese, Chief Operations Engineer for Google, was memorable not only for the topic but for the charisma of the speaker," he adds.

What William likes most about attending LISA each year is the interaction with other experts in his field. "It's like sharpening a knife," he explains. "I hear of new ideas and learn new techniques, and come away with information I can find useful at my job."

Why should sys admins attend LISA '11 in Boston? Because of the experts and knowledge, William says. "They will hear from people doing interesting and innovative things, and they will have the chance to interact with people who have been in this field for 20 years or more," he adds.