Blog entries tagged with "oscon"

For the past few days I have been immersed in OSCON, of which my single word summary is: overwhelming.

Saturday:

On Saturday I flew from Las Vegas into Portland, got to my accommodation, had a quick break and then headed to the OSCON venue for registration. The registration was pretty quick so I went to find some dinner and then headed out with my camera, ended up around the Steel Bridge as the sun was setting.

Sunday:

I had a nice sleep in on Sunday (I only had the three day ticket which did not include the Sunday (or Monday) tutorials) before heading out again to explore Portland (this is where I found that my lens was no longer a zoom lens) before getting to the OSCON Ignite event. There was food and the talks were entertaining. Don’t take my word for it, they are up on YouTube.

Monday:

Monday was another tutorial day, while there were some sponsored tutorials I could have gone to, they didn’t interest me. I spent the morning deciding what to do about my lens, before heading out to be a tourist and then back to the OSCON venue for the Expo Hall Opening Reception. Again there was free food, but it didn’t take me long to get bored with the Expo Hall as I had no interest talking to people at booths about what their company did. This was followed by the Elements Attendee Party which also had more food and some interesting live performance art.

Tuesday:

My first full day for OSCON was Tuesday which, after the opening and a few keynotes, was packed full of sessions on a wide variety of topics. If you look at the schedule you can see that there were eighteen (18) different rooms, each with a session. A few weeks ago I had tried to figure out which sessions to go to, I started by finding all of the perl sessions and others that interested me, these included:

• Perl 5.20: Perl 5 at 20
• Raspberry Pi Hacks
• Schemas for the Real World
• You Don’t Know How Your Computer Works
• The Conway Channel

Wednesday:

Much like Tuesday, Wednesday was packed full of sessions. I had intended to get to the perl lightning talks, but I ended up going out to dinner instead. Memorable talks included:

• Checking Your Privilege: A How-To for Hard Things
• Everyday Perl 6
• Highly Functional Programming in Perl
• The Data Structures (You Think) You Need to Know
• There Will Be Bugs
• Open Source Protocols and Architectures to Fix the Internet of Things
• Mind the Gap: Architecting UIs in the Era of Diverse Devices

Thursday:

Being the last day of OSCON this day was much of the same, but shorter and I ended up joining up with a group for an Underground Portland Walking Tour.

• Storytelling on the Shoulders of Giants
• Hacking Lessons: Which Micro-Controller Board Do I Use?
• Writing Documentation that Satisfies Your Users

Overall:

As I said at the top, this was an overwhelming few days and I have a lot to think about.

Though there was one realisation that I had during one of the IoT talks, devices are currently too fragmented and are also fragile because of how they are intended to be retrofitted. Why should your smart light bulb be rendered inoperative by the ingrained act of flicking the switch on the wall? Shouldn’t the light bulb stay the same but the switch become smart? Granted, a smart switch isn’t able to change the colour (but it could dim) of a non-smart bulb, but then why not have a two part system if that is what you want? Another way to phrase it could be having a true smart home, not a home full of smart devices…