OSCON 2008 Reflections, Part 1
O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention is now over for 2008, and I now have the rest of the day to relax, rest, and reflect before my flight tomorrow.
I ended up doing a lot of reflecting, so in the interest of not publishing a novel in one chapter, I broke this post up into several parts, and will post them more or less daily (if I remember) over the next few days.
Christine commented that I’ve effectively been off the grid this week, and that’s been mostly true. I’ve handled a few E-Mails, mostly customer-related, but otherwise I’ve been a lot less available than even the last time I was here.
That’s mildly odd, because I’ve also been a good bit less social this time around (last time I hung out a lot with the PostgreSQL folks; this time, other than an evening with the Mozilla QA people and a Birds-of-a-Feather session on open source in churches and missions, I barely spoke with anyone).
On the other hand, I was personally paying for this conference, whereas the last one was paid for by my former employer, so I had a lot more incentive to squeeze every penny of value out of the conference that I could. Not that I was slacking off the last time, by any stretch. Which is exactly why I’ve gotten a few “Hello?” E-Mails this week, I suppose.
I don’t think I learned as much this time as I did last time, on an absolute scale. That doesn’t really surprise me — I knew a lot less last time, and I’ve spent the past four years working on expanding on what I picked up from that conference. But the sessions at this conference did do a lot to fill in gaps and refine my knowledge, and would have been worth it for that reason alone.
One thing I learned last time was that it can be a better use of time to follow certain speakers around than just picking sessions off the chart based on topic. Quite simply, this is because some speakers can make any topic a worthwhile learning experience, while other speakers haven’t spent enough time learning about speaking to be able to effectively present even an interesting topic.
That was borne out this time as well. After the first day of the conference, I decided to follow Paul Fenwick of Perl Training Australia, to the extent that I watched him give the same talk twice. He was probably the best presenter at the conference this year, at least that I saw. His presentation style is fairly similar to Damian Conway’s (another person on my “follow” list).
A mildly related observation is that you know you picked a good (or at least an esoteric) session on Perl when Larry Wall is in the audience. For any CCC people reading this, that would be roughly akin to you giving a talk on the Four Spiritual Laws and having Bill Bright sitting in the first or second row, watching and listening attentively. So, Tim Bunce (of DBI fame) made it onto my “follow” list after that session, too. His presentations weren’t of the same caliber as the other two (few are), but they were very useful.
Speaking of usefulness, I skipped nearly all of the keynotes, except when Damian C. and Paul F. were presenting. Maybe it’s that open source is more of a pragmatic consideration for me than it is an ideological one, though I suspect that at least some of the keynotes were paid advertising. In any case, they didn’t seem all that interesting, and I heard at least a few others (who did attend) say the same thing. This had the added benefit that it let me sleep in.
Oh, and speaking of sleep, having a conference in Portland, OR was really nice once I got here. It meant that an 8:30am start time was actually an 11:30am start time as far as my physiology is concerned, which is a much better time for a morning session for geeks to start, in my opinion.
And that’s probably enough for one post. Observations on geek anthropology, conference topics, and presentation styles will be coming up subsequently.
