OSCON's coming up in Portland in July. I always go to OSCON for the hallway track. (And it's worth it for that alone.) The sessions have never really been my thing.
But this year, there's actually something that I'm dying to see: Avi Bryant's talk on Seaside.
Seaside is a somewhat heretical web framework. They generate their HTML. They don't embrace meaningful URLs. They use Smalltalk, of all things.
Of course, by making these crazy choices, they get insane amounts of power. When we were building Jifty, we stole liberally from everything that had good ideas. We dragged Rails down a dark alley and rifled through its pockets. We grabbed Catalyst's wallet.
But really, Seaside's killer features like Continuations and Halos...just stopped me in my tracks. Once we got them into our grubby little perlish hands, I realized: This is the way development is supposed to be.
So. Now I get to see the master explain the rest of Seaside's magic. That's worth the ticket price right there. Especially because then I'm going to go home and spend the next few weeks stealing the rest. ;)
Oh. And I'm giving a talk on Jifty, too.
[1] Really, it's been Ruby since before Ruby was Ruby.