Blog entries tagged with "osdc2010"

A week and a half ago the Open Source Developers’ Conference was held for the seventh time in Australia, the fourth time in Melbourne. I have been to all seven so far and there was no way I was going to miss it, especially as it was local, even though it did clash with another conference.

That clash caused me to miss the last day of the conference. Unfortunately that was the day that Damian Conway was giving two talks. I am glad the the talks were recorded, but I have yet to find time to watch them. (1, 2)

Before I run through my highlights of the first two days I will touch briefly on the biggest negative of the conference. It was held in Melbourne. This is bad because I live in Melbourne.

For the past three years the conference has been in Brisbane, Sydney and then Brisbane again. I enjoyed the conference much better at those places as I was able to immerse myself in the conference. In 2007 I stayed in the hotel that was the venue, so I just had to stumble downstairs, in 2008 I stayed just around the corner from the venue, so it was a short work, and in 2009 I stayed in the city so it was a bus ride to the venue, but I knew others who were staying in the city as well.

But with the conference being in Melbourne I had no hotel to stay in, I travelled home each night. Since I had the option of driving (instead of 1.5 hours on public transport each way) I drove which meant I didn’t stay back for the social drinks as late as I wanted to. If it hadn’t conflicted with TAM, I wonder if it would have been worth the expense of finding somewhere near the venue to stay…

Looking back at the program (there seemed to be a higher number than usual of last minute changes) there are only two sessions apart from the lightning talks that jump out at me:

• C’Dent, the Acmeism and Everyone / Ingy döt Net
• Development on Open Source platforms with a billion dollars at risk / Adam Kennedy

Of these three sessions, the highlight was Adam’s talk about the scale of the environment that he works with and how it is structured. I may go into that later in another post.

From the second day, four sessions (again excluding the lightning talks) were memorable:

• Baby Steps into Open Source – Incubation and Mentoring at Apache / Noirin Shirley
• OtherSkills Lightning session / Arjen Lentz
• perl5i: Perl 5 Improved / Michael Schwern
• Git For Ages 4 And Up / Michael Schwern
• Lightning talks

Arjen’s session was lightning talks of a non technical nature, the highlight being Noirin getting us all to stand up and try to learn the Charleston. This was so popular it was repeated during the standard lightning talks session later in the day.

While Noirin’s talk on the Apache community was interesting as we Schwern’s perl5i talk, Schwern’s demonstration of Git revisions using Tinkertoy‘s was the standout.

So, overall it was a great conference and I intend to watch Damian’s two talks, plus any others that I missed such as Rainbox House v4.

I can’t wait for next year.