OSCON 2007
I’m heading off to OSCON 2007 in Portland in a couple of hours. This is my first OSCON, and I’ll be blogging my experiences while there. I’m signed up for several tutorials on Monday and Tuesday. The sessions on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday look like they’re awesome also.
Tutorials I’m signed up for:
Title: Target Practice: A Workshop in Tuning MySQL Queries
Date: 07/23/2007
Time: 8:30am to 12:00pm
Title: Scalable Internet Architectures
Date: 07/23/2007
Time: 1:30pm to 5:00pm
Title: Technical Management of Software Development
Date: 07/24/2007
Time: 8:30am to 12:00pm
Handout
Title: Making Programs Faster
Date: 07/24/2007
Time: 1:30pm to 5:00pm
Here are links to the conference website and wiki
Watch this spot for more information during the day each day!
–dhw
how was it?
This was my first OSCON, and it was really good. I think I was a bit unprepared for the whole experience, which prevented me from saying it was “great”.
I registered for both the tutorials and the conference. The tutorials were 3 hours long, plenty of time to develop and cover a topic. As I mention in a later entry, the MySQL tuning tutorial was great. There were other tutorials on managing developers, optimizing your (Perl) programs, etc – all of which were exactly what I expected
Once the conference started, the tutorials ended and the conference sessions started. Most of the conference sessions were < 1hr (45 min or so), which was a *very* short period of time to cover some of the highly technical topics. Conference sessions are a good place to get the buzzwords and links you need to go off and research the topic yourself. There’s not much chance to ask questions, or explore the finer points of a topic.
There were several BOF sessions, but I didn’t go to any of them. None of the BOF sessions were very topical for my day job, so I ended up grabbing supper and going back to the hotel to catch up on work stuff. If I’d known that less than a week after my return I’d be laid off, I would have concentrated less on work and more on Open Source.
Knowing what I know now, I’ll be able to soak up much more of my next OSCON. I’d recommend it to everyone, with the possible exception of the most staunch Microsoft fanboys.
dhw