My adventures at OSDC
This year's OSDC was about ten times better than last year's conference; primarily because I was not on the committee, and was therefore able to sleep during the preceeding weeks. I've had a very enjoyable time, and will try and jot down as much as I can remember.
Day 1
Jacinta, Adam Kennedy and myself all arrived bright and early for registrations, and discovered that everything seemed to be under control. I managed to catch up with a few old friends, work furiously on improvements to my slides, and act as a session chair on the Perl stream.
Adam gave an excellent talk on PPI, and after lunch I gave my talk on Presentation Mind Control. This looked like it went down extremely well, especially as afterwards I was approached by a number of people asking if I could present it at their local user-group/conference. I'm hoping these people will follow up with e-mail, as not everyone had a business card, and I didn't always have the opportunity to jot notes on the back.
We received lots of good feedback on our coffee mug design, which not only held more coffee than the conference cups, but also doubles as a regular expression reference.
The conference dinner was better than last year, and featured a light-hearted talk from Anthony Baxter on Presentation Mind Control Conference Presentation Humour, which luckily only had a very small overlap with my own talk.
Day 2
Being at a conference always makes me want to re-write my slides, ususlly because I've been exposed to better ideas, presentation styles, or running gags. As such, the early morning was spent frantically editing presentation materials. After morning tea I gave my second presentation, this time on Starting an Open Source Business. It was easy to spot the small-business owners in the audience — they were the ones who kept nodding, and who caught me afterwards to swap horror stories.
After lunch there was the first lightning talk session. Lightning talks are great. They're short, snappy, and have a low barrier to entry. I gave a quick demonstration of a minesweeper bot that I had finished the day before (and the source-code of which will be distributed soon), and a brief tour of Acme::ButFirst, which already had running gags even before I presented it. I'd really love to find a list of all the lightning talks somewhere, perhaps on a wiki somewhere that conference delegates can edit.
Audrey "Autrijus" Tang gave an excellent and entertaining presentation on PUGS. Despite having followed PUGS from a distance for some time, the presentation really helped make things click, and I even have the Glasgow Haskell Compiler downloading as I write this.
Jacinta gave her presentation on social networking, and ran a very successful networking BOF after Audrey's keynote. As a conseqence I have a stack of business cards as thick as my thumb.
Day 3
By the final day of the conference it was clear that getting more sleep would have been a good idea. Exciting talks of the day included a presentation by Audrey on Learning Haskell, and one from Scott Penrose on working with Gumstix embedded devices. Along with Jon Oxer's keynote on the first day regarding hardware hacking, I'm begining to regret my lack of electronics skills, although this should be easily fixed. RFID enabled chickens and coop should be a fun project.
During the lightning talks I presented on using strict, and a very short piece on Games::EverQuest::LogLineParser, which was really an excuse for me to talk like a pirate in front of an audience. What was scary is the number of Python/Twisted people who grabbed me afterwards and started conversations with "Ahoy m'hearty!"
The day ended with a keynote from the Waughs, and a trip down to the pub for drinks. Given how little sleep we'd been getting, Jacinta and myself left relatively early to get some rest. Adam arrived home not long afterwards, and we spent the evening playing games and watching some very wrong animated reality-TV show that Adam had dug up from somewhere.
I've now got a very long list of e-mails to send, presentations to revise, code to release, or documentation to review. If you're on this list (or think you should be), then sending me an e-mail is a great reminder.
