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