OSCon2k6 Day 5 Midday Report

[note: I’m sitting here in the portland airport saturday night, getting ready to catch the red-eye back east to gainsville. I meant to post this Friday afternoon, but got caught up in other activities. It’s the final notes on OSCON, I hope you enjoy it] After wheelers talk I attempted to sit in on the perl hacks you never knew talk, but decided I didn’t know them for good reason, bailed out, and went to the PHP patterns talk. George gave a ince overview of the concept of patterns and why they are so popular with OO programming. One snafu that occured was, during the talk, his im client popped up a message during talk… thats awkward… and why i dont even connect to the network when I do my talks (george’s dog is doing well by the way). Mostly he went over classical patterns like the singlton, iterator, and factory pattern. It was interesting enough, though I think a little more emphasis on why people should use patterns would have been good. After that it was back out for the final keynote from Eblin Moglin. He’sa lawyer, so he tends to drag on at time, but it was good to here someone remind how important the free software movement is beyond open source. It was unfortunate the he also butchered the meaning of Tim ORielly’s “are licenses obsolete” catch phrase, a trend that occured several times over the past week, but his point was important (freedom is more important than open standards) and hopefully reminded a few people of this side of the open source equation. I certainly give a tip of the hat to O’Rielly, noted pragmatists in the open source movement, for including him in the conference. Overall I have to say this was another fine conference from O’Reilly. It has it’s share of warts (the length of breaks, some of the speakers were sketchy, and the wireless got spotty in places) but no where else can you meet such a wide range of people all centered on pushing forward open source technology. The PostgreSQL angle was a little bitter sweet for me. There were highlights, like the fact that I recognized so few postgresql users at the BOF (a good sign usage is expanding) and that the booth had a steady flow of traffic, but there were also some downers, such as the postgresql track not being terribly exciting (some of this may be summit hangover) and the somewhat sour state of the postgresql job market (based on pervasives announcement, the orielly trends talk, and my own personal conversations with people). Right now there is a shortage of postgresql dba’s, and yet not a lot of choices for postgresql dba’s either. I think we need to figure out how to get oracle/db2/mssql dba’s to take an interest in getting postgresql knowledge, but I don’t see anyone making much of an effort in this area. I suppose that’s not really conference specific, but it’s something I came awaywith because of the conference, so for that reason I lump it all together. Will I be back? I hope so. This year I spoke on Ruby on Rails, and I really enjoyed it. I hope to speak again next year too, so I’m already kicking some ideas around for them. Unless you have the right connections, you need to be flexible on the conference circuit, so being prepared is a must in this quick changing world of open source. Hopefully the rest of you will start planning fornext year as well [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=”:-)” style=”display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;” class=”emoticon” /]]