(This a follow-up to this item, which may not have been syndicated to all the same places, since it isn't in exactly the same categories.)

Selected moments from the last couple of days of OSCON:

• The Python BOF on Wednesday night. Excellently moderated by David Goodger. Probably around 20 or so people there. Many being fairly experienced Python users. A general consensus that selling Python to the PHB level of management is still senselessly hard. It's almost an argument for certification. All involved in the hiring process seemed to agree that wouldn't change the way they hired, though. Teaching Python to good people is easy and Python's the type of language where you can get a good feeling about an existing developer's work in a number of ways. A piece of paper won't change that. Other topics including code organisation, other languages used, promoting certain packages as reference implementations were all interesting. Over two hours of good conversation (and beers).

• The Django BOF on the following night was well attended, too. Around 18 people, ranging from a few who were just starting out to some who were using it in high profile site. Conversation mostly driven by the more experienced users. I came away with a list of about 15 things that we can look at that I need to write up as an email to django-dev over the next day or two. Hallway conversation after the hour-long BOF went for another 90 minutes with a different group of people.

• A talk on 37signals' experiences with using Amazon's S3 for mass storage was interesting. Mostly it was a litany of woes about "what can go wrong will", but it provided some very constructive lessons learnt about the extra work you have to do and expectations if you're going to hitch your business implementation to something like S3.

• r0ml is a very entertaining speaker and I enjoy hearing him talk. Always something to learn about presentation. However, his point and generally excellent arguments are sometimes obscured by his entertainment style and this is a shame. It took a lot of work to sort wheat from chaff in his Preventing Code presentation.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman's talk on the state of the Linux kernel in 2007 will be useful as data for the future. He's done a lot of crunching of numbers with regards to number of contributors (including nice chart), number of lines of code, proportion of change in various subsystems, and so forth. The simple conclusion is that anybody trying to maintain a parallel branch of the kernel is looking impossibility in the face. Pushing things into the mainline is the only way to go, because it's just too frantic. And yet, the system mostly works. The kernel remains healthy and solid.

• Having contact with other Django developers and users during the day was very motivating. I got a lot of coding done during downtime between talks and in the evening back at the hotel. Some big ticket items, too (since the little ticket stuff tends to take care of itself).

The last few days have been a bit of a blur, so there might be an OSCON, part III post once my brain settles down and organises things.

Mostly recovering today and doing very little. Off to New York City tomorrow to enjoy ... I don't know ... stuff. Weather. Central Park. Manhattan Restaurants. Things like that.

Topics: software/django, conferences/OSCon, travel

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OSCON has been a blast so far. Been good to meet up with a few people I only see once a year or so, as well as meet some people who were previously only names on mailing lists.

Had a few good conversations with Jacob, Simon and Jeremy (Dunck), amongst others about some broader Django issues and design things. So much easier to thrash out the early details face-to-face before writing up a more reasoned presentation for the mailing list.

Entering the US was not the most pleasant part of the trip. Took an inordinate amount of time to complete the queue-and-shuffle dance through immigration. Increased terror scare levels or something. Lots of questions about my intentions, return date, etc — and it wasn't just me; everybody was getting the extra attention, so it took a lot longer than normal.

Still... here now. Recovered (mostly) from the trip. Enjoying the food, conversations and company. Lots of fun. :-)

Topics: conferences/OSCon, travel

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For a couple of weeks, I've been trying to decide whether to attend OSCON this year. Combining air travel, conference fee, hotel, food, etc, it's by no means a cheap gig. On the other hand, most of my Open Source work is with people in other countries and conferences like this are a rare chance to catch up with old friends and meet new people doing interesting things.

Today was Make A Decision day and the decision is "go"!

No backing out now: conference attendance is booked. So, July 23 - 27 I will be joining all the other crazies in Portland for hopefully a good time.

Topics: conferences/OSCon

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Arrived home this morning from the trip to OSCON. A little bit wasted today, although I managed to stay awake for most of the day, so should be back to somewhat normal by tomorrow.

What a terrific conference! As I mentioned earlier, I had never attended OSCON before and I was interested to see what it would be like. I can only say that I do not really begrudge the money it cost or the time involved. A very professionally organised event that still catered nicely to the very technical audience who attended (a group of people who can, at times, be extremely and needlessly hard to please). Little things like putting on a continental breakfast each morning from 07:00 and having boxed lunches available for everybody, through to having rooms available until 09:30 or so in the evening, meant that there was always something to do. You can never attend a conference like this and hope to see everything. Instead, you pick a few "must sees" and then fill in the remaining time with whatever grabs your interest.

A brief experience summary that cannot convey how it really felt, but these might act as pushes for me to write further about some things in the future:

• Meeting the Django maintainers Adrian and Jacob, was a highlight. The chance to sit down with these two and debate a few things and work out future plans over a couple of meals made me a bit more comfortable about what I could to help Django in the near future. Email is not always the best place to have wild debates or discuss processes. You have to be able to see their eyes when making a point, sometimes.
• Tim Bray's Atom publishing talk was interesting enough. My big take away was that there were no surprises in what he said. I think this means I understand the bulk of the spec, so the code I am writing is not going to completely suck. Interested to hear that Tim is writing a tester for publishing servers.
• In Jacob Kaplan-Moss's Django talk, close to half the audience of 60 or 70 people had not used Django before, so we are clearly getting the word out beyond the hard-core developers. Maybe a third of the audience had deployed apps using Django, or were in the late stages of development. Only one audience member had contributed code, though -- not sure how to evaluate that one.
• The Django BOF convinced me that the message about Django being useful in many realms, not just blogging, not just newspapers is not being lost. Having people from Google and Disney sitting in the room mentioning that they are using it is kind of cool. Unfortunately, we probably needed another hour of time, since our room booking ended part way through a round of "pie in the sky" feature requests that was interesting food for thought.
• Hearing about the various LiveJournal-inspired performance tools, such as memcached, perlbal and MogileFS, from their creators was interesting. Very few successful software developers do not have strong opinions about why "other solutions suck". These guys are no different, but, as usual, they have turned those opinions into working alternatives, which helps us all.
• The Oregon Brewers Festival was a great way to spend Friday afternoon after the conference had ended.
• As usual, technical conferences act as a "chicken soup for the soul" when it comes to getting inspiration to work on software. Whilst a fairly clueless thread was refusing to die on a developers' mailing list, I could ignore the email community for a few hours and talk to real people who have and were achieving real things with their own work and on top of the contributions of others. Real people trump email addresses as inspiration any day, in my book.
• Powell's Books is brilliant. I spent hours in there on Friday evening and Saturday (both their main store and the technical store).

I didn't take as many photos as I should have, but a small set of acceptable ones is available.

Topics: software/django, conferences/OSCon

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Jacob's post reminded me to mention that I'm joining the masses heading off to OSCON next week in Portland. Looking forward to catching up with some old friends and meeting some people who I only currently know through mailing lists. (That I live in the same city as celebrity speaker Jeff and see him less than once a year is pathetic. Maybe Portland will be our 2006 visit.)

I haven't attended this conference before, mostly because if I'm going to travel all the way to North America, OLS is around the same time and a lot cheaper. This year, it's time to splash out and fill in one of the missing conferences on my list of "conferences to attend before I die". So, flights, hotel, registration all booked. Laptop bits and pieces located. Need to remember to charge the camera battery and I'm set (I travel enough that I can just put my hand on the plastic baggie with the right currency in it, the right power plug converters, the travel bag, etc; a bit sad, really).

Topics: software/django, conferences/OSCon, travel

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