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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Oregon Brewers Festival was a great way to spend Friday afternoon after the conference had ended.
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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.
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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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