On the final day of the conference I woke up early and managed to find my way to the venue on my own.
Once there I took care of some work issues and off we went to the talks.
- Zaltana, by Scott Penrose
"Zaltana is a simple old woman who lives in the mountains. All the people in town think she's crazy."
In this opening keynote, Scott presented Zaltana: the fusion of PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, Java and more.
Scott gave us a very interesting presentation. I never thought I'd see someone taking off a kilt on stage.
And then I missed the first talk, but no harm done, because the ones that followed were really awesome!
- The Portable Image Testing Architecture: Ridiculously Large Scale Testing, by Adam Kennedy
With a tremendous presentation, Adam went through the current situation and problems of CPAN Testers.
The talk, which was very well done, is just too... too... too "ridiculously large" for a Portuguese guy in the wrong timezone (by 11 hours) in the end of a conference to manage to explain in a few words.
But I can tell you it culminated in what's to be CPAN Testers 2.
It was very, very interesting.
- Human Interfaces for Geeks, by Paul Fenwick
So if you're a geek, how do you interact with other people?
This was a great talk on how to deal with regular humans.
If you haven't already, I recommend that you buy and read "Making friends and influencing people", by Dale Carnegie. Paul has avoided a fine on public transportation, and so have I, thanks to the knowledge that's on that book.
- Usability, user-centered design (UCD) and FOSS, by Scott Ripon
In the team I lead we have some people dedicated to Usability and Acessibility, and given that most people don't even know what that means I was quite surprised to see a talk on this subject at OSDC.
Moreover, I was very surprised to see a good talk on this subject! :-)
I hope Scott puts his slides online real soon.
And then I missed another talk... you see, conferences are not just talks, it's also about people :-)
OK, and beer.
- Lightning Talks
There were some amazing lightning talks!
Unfortunately, I can't remember any...
Oh, wait, it's coming back!
* Paul presented an interpreter for the new language OSDc. It's on CPAN now, I think.
* Somebody tried to create an application on Mongrel in less than 5 minutes... and failed...
* Somebody tried to create an application on Ruby in less than 5 minutes... and succeeded...
* And Kieren, who had failed the day before in the creation of a Catalyst application in less than 5 minutes, this time came prepared and brought a web chat which many of us promptly used, thus killing his machine O:-)
* Someone created For::Else, which seems to be a pretty cool idea. I wonder why it isn't part of perl yet... O:-)
* And I did what seemed to be a very funny talk on "What I learned at OSDC". I may put the slides online real soon, but I guess you had to be there... O:-)
And there were some more LTs, most of which were really funny and interesting.
- Conference Close
And then the conference came to an end...
A lot of thankyous and everybody seemed happy, particularly the ones who won book prizes...
And I was one of them! :-D
And thus it all ended.
I am now writing this entry in a bar.
Tomorrow I'll be taken somewhere to see something with some people... I don't know what it is exactly, but it sounds interesting :-) Really :-)
Then I'm staying with Paul and Jacinta for one night, spending Sunday with them and Randal, off to Sydney where I'll be staying at Adam's for a few days and speaking at the local PM group (given that Jacinta just told me she "volunteered" me to do that), and then it's back to Melbourne and off to Portugal.
I expect the following days to be great :-)
