OSCON Day 3,4 and 5
When I was heading to Portland I mentioned that I was going to try and blog every day of my trip. If regularly read my blog you will noticed I fell short on this one and it has been five days. The main reason for this was the amazing pace of OSCON and surrounding events. Every day was so action packed that I was exhausted in the evening and did not to use any brain cells to write. So I am doing it now at 40832 ft high and 512 miles an hour.
My last post was Tuesday afternoon and this was before the Tuesday night keynotes. Tuesday is where my mind exploded for the first time. I had herd of Damian Conway before and Greenfly even mentioned that he was a great speaker but nothing could have prepared me for his keynote. If you are EVER presented the opportunity of attending one of his lectures or presentations DO NOT MIS IT! Anyone who invented a programming language in latten for some fun is just a crazy cool guy. I won????????t even go into his plans to build a baywolf cluster of PostScript printers. Next Larry Wall took the stake to give us the State of the Perl Address. I never expected this one to be funny but I think it had many of us rolling in the isles. I think what makes all the big keynote speakers great is they are more then just people with a commanding knowledge in their field. They are also passionate about what they do and know how too translate their passion into fun for others. I walked out of the hall with so many thoughts that I could hardly sleep Tuesday night.
Unlike the first two days where there where 4 hour half day tutorials with half hour breaks day 3, 4, and five where more like Penguicon, shorter 55 minute sessions. The other thing about day 3,4 and 5 is the main exhibit hall was open.
The exhibit hall was filled with all the usual non profit groups you would expect like: PostgreSQL, BSD, Local Lugs, and more then I can list. All the big computer companies you would expect where there too: Google, SUN, Yahoo, CA, Apple and again many more. I went around and talked to most every company to find out why they where there and gathered some information.
I attended so many great presentations I am not even going to try and list them. The thing is official sessions was only half of it, I can not even begin to describe what it was like to just talk to all the whose who of open source. Things like arguing about PHP with Marcus Borger, I should note that it was in good fun and Marcus did say I was one of two cool Perl guys. I actually meant the creator of PgPool who had flow in all the way from Japan, and most of the PostgreSQL development team. I can not imagine where else you can meet and talk to so many people so pivotal to open source projects.
To take a minute and plug my self I did do my presentation ???????PostgreSQL Built Your Car??????? on Thursday morning. I was in the PostgreSQL booth just running over my slides one last time then I was off to room D140. I got in the room and was a bit distracted from the people in the room while I get my laptop all set up. To my shock not only was the room packed, standing room only, all the heavy PostgreSQL hitters showed up. To be honest this is when I got VERY nervous. Most of these guys have been around PostgreSQL from the beginning and if anyone could have found a problem or torn my presentation to shreds it was them! Fortunately 30 seconds into the presentation I got into my groove and I have to say I was 100% in my groove. I talked for 45 minutes and then 10 minutes of questions. That was not where it stopped though, the next two days I was approached my several people about the presentation and it was all positive! I did let some of it go to my head and it was nice to know that my many hours of preparation where not wasted.
I know this was my longest blog post to date and it only covers about 1/100 of my OSCON experience. I imagine that over the next few weeks I will be talking more about my last week and how incredible it was. My goal for the next year is to ensure I make it back to OSCON. It was grueling and tiring and most nights my brain hurt but I feel I learned more in 5 days about Perl, PostgreSQL, and Unix then I typically learn in 5 months.