I'm visiting Australia for OSDC2008 in Sydney. It's been a pretty good conference so far and there are a few interesting talks lined up today before I jump onto a plane back to New Zealand this afternoon.
Wednesday kicked off with a fun talk from Chris Dibona which was essentially a bunch of interesting anecdotes from Google. Then I went along to see Michael Neale talk about rule based systems. It seems like a technology that should be highly applicable to my current client - but only if we rewrite their system from the ground up :-(. I'll have to think about how we could start to take advantage of this stuff in a smaller steps.
I was also fascinated by Clifford Heath's talk on semantic modelling. He presented well and clearly has put a lot of work into it. The talk followed a bottom-up sort of approach to introduce concepts that built on each other. It probably would have benefitted from a top-down bit as well. That would have given the audience more of an idea of where the talk was heading and given them a framework to hang the lower-level concepts onto.
My first talk was Wednesday afternoon and looked at the theory and practice of Test Driven Development. Unfortunately the accompanying paper was accidentally omitted from the printed conference proceedings but you can download it from my web site. I think I managed to avoid embarassing gaffes and the talk seemed to be well received.
Jacinta was up next with a good round up of Perl MVC frameworks. David Fetter did a good talk on DBI-Link in Postgres 8.4 but since we have yet to get our client up to 8.3, I think I'll defer getting too excited about that one. The lightning talks and the conference dinner went well and Anthony Baxter's dinner talk was highly entertaining.
Thursday was a quieter day for me. There weren't a lot of talks that appealed to me and a couple that I did go to were disappointing. Of course some of that may be my own fault - my head was a bit fuzzy from a late night and lots of beer. Jonathan Oxer had a couple of good talks that led me to doubt his sanity but they were very entertaining. After the lightning talks the Sydney Perl Mongers organised an outing for more beer and food on Thursday night. That was great - thanks guys.
My second talk is later today and I've got to dash off early this afternoon to catch a flight back to Wellington. Looking forward to a few of today's talks.
