I never know what to expect when I’m invited to speak at a regional (or in-country) Network Operator Group (NOG) meeting. Sometimes, it turns out to be a large conference (PLNOG and ITNOG come to mind); other times, it’s just a few people gathered around free donuts and coffee¹. Last week’s Croatian NOG (NOG.HR) meeting was in the Goldilocks zone between the extremes: plenty of interested networking engineers, but not large enough to be overpowering.

Also, it was such a nice experience ;)

The organizers did an excellent job, the presentations were interesting², and I don’t think I ever got so many relevant questions after my netlab presentation. The questions evolved into a long hallway discussion (another first) that generated several interesting ideas including running an SDN lab with Open vSwitch, link impairment capability, starting a lab from a remote GitHub repo, and adding support for OPNsense³.

The only missing bit: while the meetup presentations are usually published a few days after the conference, it seems they’re not publishing a recording of the event.

To summarize: if Zagreb is not too far away from where you are, NOG.HR is worth attending, and I plan to be back, hopefully with another interesting presentation.

And now, I have to get ready for the next stop on my Croatian road trip: the DEEP conference in Zadar. It’s starting on Wednesday, so you can probably still register if you want to attend my Disaster Recovery Myths and Vendor Fairy Tales presentation.