The celular rang at 7am, as intended.
My body apparently decided I needed some more sleep to take care of the jetlag thing, reached in the direction of the noise and turned it off.
The phone rang at 8:10, with Jacinta on the other side:
- Hello? We're waiting for you downstairs!
- Right! I'll be right up!
I managed to get dressed quickly, went down and noticed that Randal was even more late than I was, apparently... in fact, he didn't even show up O:-)
So off we went to the venue, and on the way there Jacinta asked me:
- Did I wake you up?
Part of me thought "What on Earth makes you think you succeded?" but the word coming out of my mouth was "Yes."
Once at the venue, and since I hadn't had any breakfast, I skipped the opening keynote of the day and the first talk, sitting calmly by the place where the morning tea was expected, hoping that the noises my stomach was making weren't upsetting anyone in the rooms.
After finally eating something I started writing down a long answer to an anonymous coment in one of my Portuguese blogs and I ended up missing the following talk.
And after that I finally managed to see a couple of talks:
- Apache Configuration Primer, by Jonathan Oxer
John explained a bit of the configuration mechanism for Apache 2 to the 50 people in the room.
Unfortunately, it seems I wasn't quite awake yet, and thus I had some trouble focusing and paying attention to the talk... :-(
Fortunately, John is going to put his slides online!
- Retooling the World Wide Web for its Original Purpose, by Kieren Diment
Kieren gave us a tour on the evolution of Web development from his point of view and he also showed us some of the things he did over the years. It was very interesting, particularly as his experience includes mod_perl, Maypole and Catalyst, among other things.
Kieren is also very interested in the science of Open Source communities. I had the opportunity to chat with him yesterday while sharing a cab and he really has some interesting ideas, as you can see here.
- System Administration Skills for Developers, by Geoff Crompton
Best talk of the day, in my opinion.
Apart from being a good speaker, Geoff also managed to talk about several interesting things, such as documentation, backups, tracking issues, changes and automation.
Way to go, Geoff!
- Lightning Talks
10 slots, but no online schedule, which makes it difficult for me to write down the titles of the talks and respective authors...
However, I do remember:
* Someone giving a very simple explanation of how RSA works...
* Me trying to convince people to show the world outside Australia that they do exist, and thus getting more people from abroad to their conferences (hey, I came here and it all started with a guy posting about his chickens...)
* Adam talking about Acme::Playmate, his ideas to create Acme::Playmate::Object, the possibility of expanding it to Acme::Playmate::Object::Doublet, the insight of turning that into Acme::Playmate::Object::Doublet::Outsource and the necessity of finally creating Acme::Playmate::Object::Doublet::Outsource::AU. His lightning talk was entitled "How to name your CPAN module"...
* Someone showing cvs logs in a colourful mode (just great)
* Kieren desperately trying to create a Catalyst app in less than 5 minutes
* Someone talking about the Python Papers and finally managing to show his slides in the last 30 seconds of the talk
* And a few more
And after that I just had to skip the rest of the talks, as tired as my brain was...
I really don't think there were too many interesting talks (to me) on the schedule for this day, but I'm really excited about tomorrow... "Career Development for Developer Geeks", "Usability, user-centered design (UCD) and FOSS", "Improve Your Understanding of Reg-exes", "Human Interfaces for Geeks", "Managing Distributed Version Control", "Coding in a Distributed Team", "Better Software Through Test Coverage"? Wow, they sure look like great talks :-)
The downside of it all, of course, is that some of those talks run in parallel... :-(
