William Reardon’s Blog

It’s late in coming, but some final notes on OSCON. In a nutshell,
I’ll hit Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, and Why I Won’t Be Returning To
OSCON. I’m not going to speak about every session I went to
because in some cases, I wasn’t able to take notes and in others,
frankly, simply because I wasted my time on the session doesn’t mean I
should waste your’s as well.

Day 3

Not too much today, with the exception of learning about memcached during Brad
Fitzpatrick’s LiveJournal’s
Back-end and memcached; Past, Present, and Future. To quote:

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching
system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic
web applications by alleviating database load.

Looks pretty interesting & could be useful at work.

Day 4

Useful Day.

The morning started with How
to Manage Over 1000 Servers in Your Spare Time. Sean Lynch
discussed how Ticketmaster manages over 1,000 nodes with a team of
six. Very impressive setup. Lots of focus on automation. If
I were Sang, I’d be worried.

I’d heard about Class::DBI, but hadn’t really used it before. After
this talk, Database
Abstraction with Class::DBI I’m sold. When you first start using
DBI, it’s a pleasure, as so much of the ick is hidden from you. But
work with it enough, and you find yourself doing a lot of the same.
You can modularize, formalize a few patterns, but does that
all that Class:DBI, and probably in a much better fashion as well.

Unlike Class::DBI, I’d never heard of IO::All
but man is it wicked cool. Brian Ingerson, the author, spoke about it
& a few other modules during IO::All
and Other Spiffy Modules. Like Class::DBI, it takes all the grit
you often deal with when interacting with files. He also did some
cool tricks by detecting which context a function was being called in
(e.g., boolean vs. scalar). I flat didn’t know you could do that.
That in of itself is very cool.

The last interesting session of the day was Building
Scalable Websites with Perl by Perrin Harkins. His opening slide
talked about large sites that use Perl, such as Yahoo!, Overture, and
Ticketmaster, and made a general good point of the sites most people
in the room aren’t going to see that kind of traffic. Looking around
the round, I wasn’t sure he was aware that a fair amount of us where
from Yahoo/Overture & Ticketmaster. ;-) Apparently Perrin is a
friend of Paul H’s, so I ended up chatting a little with him at the
reception afterward. During his talk, he discussed a little of how
My Yahoo! used Perl, and since I
worked on that team a few years ago, we talked a little about that.

Day 5

By most accounts, I slept through one of the best presentations of the
conference, Open
Content: How Online Digital Libraries will Provide Access to Cultural
Information in the 21st Century, although I did show up in time
for Conway’s Sufficiently
Advanced Technologies. He spoke at length about the importance of
interfaces, intelligent defaults, and thinking about how the code will
be used. It’s odd that for some people that’s an intuitive part of the
process, but after using a lot of other people’s code, it’s
clear far from everyone is like that.

The close keynote was about Lord of the Rings, which, according to
some of the folks I was with, was basically a rehash of what they
showed last year. Overall, it kinda ended on a down note, as there
weren’t many clips or anything.

Why I Won’t Be Returning To OSCON

I don’t think I’ll be return to OSCON any time soon. I’ll probably
try to come back in a few years, when Perl 6 is a bit more mature.
However, at the end of the week, it just wasn’t a good use of my time
or company money. Here’s my chief complaints:

• Clustering of good sessions
  
  The way the sessions where scheduled, you’d find yourself having to
  pick from 1 of 4 really good in one time slot, followed absolutely
  nothing interesting the next. I don’t expect O’Reilly to cater to my
  specific interests, but almost everyone I talked to encountered this
  exact same thing & point to same examples in my mind.
  * Boring Keynotes
  
  Seriously, these where the keynotes:
  
  
  
  • O’Reilly Radar
    
  • The Semasiology of Open Source
    
  • Infinite in Three Directions: In Praise of Open Thinking
    
  • Beyond Doing Business–The Continuing Importance of Community
    Development
    
  • Open Content: How Online Digital Libraries will Provide Access to
    Cultural Information in the 21st Century
    
  • Open Source Renaissance- What Novell Is Doing to Make Open Source
    a Mainstream Reality on the Desktop and Server
    
  
  Does O’Reilly have any clue at all about the demographic attending the conference?
  

  
  

• Rooms too small
  
  Big gripe. I can understand it’s hard to gauge how many people
  would attend any given session, but 1) this happened with tutorials as
  well, and even with the sessions it happened a lot. What were
  they thinking putting Conway in small rooms? Never do that.
  Largely, because most people, like me, have figured out that when in
  doubt, go to Conway’s talk, regardless of what he’s talking about.
  

  
  I’m guessing the Marriot was just too small for what OSCON needed.
  Hopefully this is something fixed for next year. Just a hint — if
  OSCON 2005 is in the Downtown Marriot again next year, don’t
  go. It doesn’t matter how compelling a session is — if you’re
  six feed outside the door in the hallway, you aren’t going to learn a
  damn thing.
  

  
  

• Help speakers give compelling presentations
  
  Most of the speakers aren’t professionals, nor do I expect them to
  be. By & large, they’re just smart folks who have something they want
  to share. Very cool. At the same time, it would be nice if O’Reilly
  had a session or two before the conference started for presenters,
  something like Conway’s Presentation Akido. I think that would go a
  long way towards improving the quality of the conference.
  

  
  

• Stingy on hand-outs
  
  For whatever reason, O’Reilly decided they were going to charge you if
  you wanted copies of hand-outs from tutorials you didn’t sign up for.
  What!? I just shelled out over a grand to get here, and now you’re
  going to nickel & dime me? I can understand the printing costs - but
  1) I’ve gone to Kinko’s — it does not cost $10 to create a
  little bound hand-out, and 2) bump up the cost of the conference up by
  $10 or $20 and give me a copy of all the talks. I’d feel like
  I’d gotten a lot more value in that case, as I can easily browse talks
  I missed at my leisure.
  

  
  

• Content
  
  My understanding of how OSCON works is that there is a call for papers
  & people propose what they’d like to talk about. Some are selected
  and those become the presentations. That’s great — it gets people
  who are passionate about what they’re doing into the mix.
  

  
  The problem is if that’s you’re only source. If that’s your
  only source, the conference will be centered around what people want
  to talk about, not what people want to hear about.
  

  
  Breaking down the sessions I like, and what would make me want to come
  back to the conference, here are some general categories of things I
  liked:
  

  
  

  
  
  • Survey of different approaches, techniques & architectures
    
    I thought it was very cool to learn how LiveJournal did things, hear
    about their experiences, etc. It gives a lot of food for thought on
    how to tackle things. So why didn’t O’Reilly contact anyone from My
    Yahoo to see if they were willing to give a talk? Or Slashdot?
    Google? Friendster? Sure some of these companies would decline, but
    quite a few would except. Geeks tend to be proud of what they’ve
    worked on and are generally flattered when someone else is curious.
    Sure, they’d have to strip out any IP or things the company wouldn’t
    want disclosed, but even after that, there’s a lot left.
    
  • Introduction to new and emerging topics
    
    I knew very little about Perl 6. It was great to hear about Conway
    talk about it. To learn about regex’s in Perl 6. No, I can’t use all
    of it now, but still very cool to learn about it now.
    
  • Introduction overviews of modules and systems.
    
    Likewise, it was great to learn about Class::DBI & IO::All. They
    could save me a lot of time going forward. They don’t necessarily
    need to be Perl modules, but bootcamps sessions are generally a great
    thing for a conference.
    
  
  

Anyway, my two cents.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 7th, 2004 at 3:06 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.