although it's been a while since ApacheCon ended, I might as well try to capture some of it before I forget more than I already have...
overall, I had a nice time. Las Vegas was, um, definitely something one needs to experience at least once, but for the most part I felt as though the city was assaulting me the entire time, bombarding me with with a cacophony of sights and sounds (well, I guess cacophony is really just sounds, but you get the idea).
as I keep going to these things, I find that I attend the sessions less and less, and prefer just hanging out with people - networking, brainstorming, and forming stronger friendships. part of it is that I've seen most of the talks I'm interested in already, while the rest are either by terribly boring speakers or happen to be going on when I'm talking. or maybe it's that I should have been on Ritalin as a child. The motorcycle dudes they had kick me out of Stas tutorial didn't help either. apparently, speakers weren't given access to the tutorials for free, just the sessions. hmph.
anyway, my talk went pretty well. I went a bit fast and skipped over some important, clarifying explanations, but overall it went pretty well. a few people said it was the best talk they attended, and nobody nodded off, which is always good. for those who are interested, a printer-friendly version of my slides can be found here
so, lemme see... the Apache crowd is definitely different than the Perl crowd (with the exception of we mod_perl folks, of course :) I spent most of my time hanging out with Eric and Stas, with a bit of Philippe thrown in for good measure. I actually found an Apache bug in CVS while fixing a bug in code for my talk, which Eric, Philippe, and I spent a while tracking down and fixing (well, Eric and Philippe did the fixing, with Aaron tidying it up - I just watched :) Over a very nice meal (courtesy of the folks at Sams) I had a chance to talk with George and Theo Schlossnagle, who are like watching a WWF tag-team match when it comes to things geeky - their collective knowledge on just about anything performance related is simply astounding. Sean Chittenden was also there, who is another whiz when it comes to, well, just about anything. I felt very much like only a developer and not terribly well rounded compared to these guys.
after being geeked-out by an evening of tech talk, it was nice to hang out with the Perl crowd. I had a nice lunch with Eric, Stas, Philippe, and Nat, where we talked about things Perl and just relaxed a bit. Nat went on to give me a demo of the Watson on OS X, which is just about the coolest thing I've seen on a desktop. At YAPC::NA, Adam Turoff said something at his web services talk that removed the splinter from my mind. it basically comes down to the fact that I'm tired of all the cruft that comes with the web these days - I don't care about little gifs that curve the edges of my menu bars, or (especially) anything Flash driven. all I want is the data, my personalized data, raw and unadulterated. Watson is certainly on the right track as far as I'm concerned (and I may just have to get one of those shiny Macs everyone seems to have but me).
the highlight of the week was dinner thursday night at The Blue Note, where Nat, Eric, Kip, and I had a great time talking shop and chillin. unfortunately, I had to bug out early to catch my flight, and along the way I lost the stuffed lion I had bought for my daughter.
I think I'll submit a talk for ApacheCon Europe next year.
