OSCON thoughts

Sophos sent me down to the Open Source Convention this week. It was a great time. I drove down with

Highlights:
- App-HWD hacking
- Damian's presentations
- Tuesday Night Extravaganza
- Paul Graham
- Damian's Dead Languages
- Chatting up the Barracuda guys about their Spyware appliance
- Why the Lucky Stiff's crazy rock band singing about Ruby
- Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 presentation
- My awesome Juggling presentation and the wonderful feedback I received
- An INCREDIBLE Dtrace presentation by Bryan Cantrill


Monday
- Woke up way too early

- Business for Geeks (Marc Hedlund)
Interesting talk about creating and pitching new ideas for starting
a business or convincing your existing company to move in a new
direction. Too much talk about Venture Capitalists, but
interesting.

- Lunch
Neil was talking with Andy Lester (who did an excellent "Project
Tracking and Estimation" presentation at YAPC::NA) about a new tool
Andy wrote to track his projects (On CPAN: App-HWD). Neil was super
excited about it. We started playing with it (it was version 0.01),
and got a bunch of ideas for further enhancements.

HWD (How We Doing) uses a simple text format to describe tasks that
need to be done, and work that has been done on those tasks. I'll
send out a seperate email about hwd. Neil and I think this tool
will fit our sprint needs very well.

- Practical mod_perl2 (Stas Bekman)
Super boring talk about mod_perl2. It was very ... um ...
thorough, covering everything. Neil and I sat at the back and
hacked while Stas gave the talk. Neil converted the existing tank
tasks list to the HWD format while I added new features to hwd.

Tuesday
- Woke up way too early

- Perl Best Practices (Damian Conway)
This was my first Damian presentation, and it was quite
entertaining; he is an excellent presenter with quality slides.
When I registered, I received full notes for his presentation, which
I'll leave on my desk.

Damian said that his best practices aren't commandments, but merely
a starting point for consistent and maintainable coding guidelines.
If we want to beat the coding guidelines cat more, I'll be happy to
go through the course notes with a group of interested people.

- Perl Object Oriented Best Practices (Damian Conway)
In the first half of this talk, Damian spent a lot time talking
about inside out objects, which are pretty cool (but not super
useful for us). I skipped the second half of the presentation to go
hack hwd with Neil.

- Tuesday Evening Extravaganza
This was an excellent show - lots of good speakers and damn funny.
Some highlights:

Paul Graham
- Paul talked about how open source and blogging is effecting the
ways companies operate. He talks about amatuers and how they can
(and do) create products of better quality than "professionals";
look at the quality of the best blogs compared to the current
print media. The "news" these days isn't so much news but merely
outlying data points. He also suggests that the formality of
business is fashion; startups usually start in a crappy
appartment, but frequently this is the most productive the company
will ever be.

I recommend reading the online essay here:
http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html

Larry Wall
- Larry's State of the Onion was somewhat interesting. As part of
his children's homeschooling, they're building a board game.
Larry talked about all of the spy characters in the game (maybe
16) and made comparisons between the characters and different
types of people in the perl community.

Damian Conway
- Damian's presentation was on "Dead languages". It was very funny.
Lisp - he showed the relative demand on some job site for various
languages compared to lisp. Then he scaled the fonts to reflect
the demand. You couldn't even see lisp... ;) Then he showed some
crazy lisp code he wrote and then walked through it. It was
great. It looked especially crazy when he later reformatted the
lisp code into K&R style.
Postscript - he created a postscript file (god that language would
be awful to program in) that would approximate pi. The super cool
thing was that you could actually send the file to a printer, and
it would continually compute pi, printing a better version on each
page. Hilarious.
C++ - he showed some crazy FSMs that he wrote in C++... Really
cool stuff. He also overloaded the -- and > operators so you
could create FSMs by writing things like this:
state1 ------> transition1 --------> state2
Latin - he explained how latin works, and how in latin you can
switch the order of the words all around. Then he showed how you
could apply the latin suffixes to perl (eg: the suffix can
imply lvalues and rvalues, the suffixes remove the need for sigils
in front of variable names), and then showed a program that was
written completely in latin. Crazy stuff.

- Wednesday
- Woke up way too early

- Opening Keynote
Nat Torkington and Tim O'Reilly talked about new trends

Andrew Morton (linux kernel hacker) talked in complete monotone
with no slides about some stuff which I promptly forgot.

- Exhibition floor
I cruised the exhibition floor, checking out booths. I stopped by
the Barracuda Networks booth (after flipping over my conference
badge), and chatted up the sales engineer there. I grilled him for
20 minutes on their new spyware proxy appliance. He gave me a full
tour of the web interface and happily answered all my questions.
Then he gave me the login and password for their demo machine and
encouraged me to check it out. Later than night I got screen caps
for all of their UI.

- Apocalypse Now! - Perl 6 is Here Today (Brian Ingerson)
Ingy gave an entertaining presentation about the current state of
pugs (Perl Users Golfing System), aka the perl 6 prototype. He
would switch between the presentation, movies made at the last
minute by the lambdacamels, and the IRC channel. During the
presentation, pugs 6.2.9 was released to the world. (The final pugs
version will be pi, so they inch forward to that.)

Movies:
http://no.perlcabal.org/~autrijus/oscon05-autrijus.mp4
http://no.perlcabal.org/~autrijus/oscon05-stevan.mp4

- The Conway Channel 2005 (Damian Conway)
Damian talked about his latest favourite modules:
Coding::Toolkit, Filter::Macro, Getopt::Euclid, List::Builder,
Object::Dumper, Policy, Regexp::MatchContext, Stdlog,
Text::Autotable

- Hacked on HWD

- Practical Perl Testing (chromatic, Andy Lester, Ian Langsworth)
These guys talked about techniques for testing perl. Most of the
techniques are covered in the excellent "Perl Testing: A Developer's
Handbook". I've ordered several copies of this for our team.

- Neil and I hacked HWD, I hacked some devweb and then we worked on
our lighting talk.

- Thursday
- Woke up way too early

- Morning Keynote
TCP/IP and Shipping Containers (Gall)
- looking at how to build systems that will be extensible for
decades. TCP/IP is super old, and has allowed tremendous
innovation on top of it. Shipping Containers are similar as well.
A standard container can be used to ship goods over land, air, sea
all without needing to open or re-package the contents.

Secrets Behind Ruby on Rails (Heinemeier Hansson)
- Great talk about why ruby is popular. The key is to accomodate
the 80% case; convention over configuration. By following
convention, you can focus on your business logic and getting the
job done instead of configuring your systems to work.

Identity 2.0 (Dick Hardt)
- I really enjoyed Dick's presentation. He must have had 2 or 3
hundred slides, and he whipped through them (he gave credit to
Larry Lessig's presentation style). Dick just stood there
talking, rapidly hitting next on the laptop while everyone watched
the fast paced slides.
- He talked about identity, what it is, how it works in the real
life (like to buy vodka), how it currently works on the web
(everyone deals with each site individually), how it could work in
the future, and what it'll take to get there.

Lighting Talks
- Some interesting talks hosted by Mark Jason Dominus:
- Rosetta, yet another database layer
- Seven Dirty Words of Progamming (excellent)
- How to make a lunch box from an O'Reilly book
- Why I hate Apache
- How not to be a nobody
- Kinosearch (interesting full-text search engine)
- Traffic shaping with mod_perl2
- Juggling Multiple Languages in the Enterprise Workplace

Lunch
- Neil and I ate lunch with the Wall family (minus Larry) and Tom
Christianson

Hacked, checked email and passed clubs with other conference
attendees.

Why the Lucky Stiff
- CRAZY presentation by Why the Lucky Stiff (whytheluckystiff.net)
featuring his band who sang songs about Ruby, crazy random
videos, hacking through technical glitches, crazy sample ruby
code, and a half failed collaborative ruby presentation.

Dtrace: Opening the Kimono (Bryan Cantrill)
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/bmc/dtrace_oscon.pdf
- EXCELLENT, passionate, excited, enthusiastic presentation by
Bryan, one of the creators of dtrace. Bryan switched between his
presentation (which covered dtrace's features, syntax and samples)
and his 64-bit opensolaris laptop where he ran little dtrace
snippets to do all sorts of cool stuff.
- Prior to this presentation I had no opinion on opensolaris, but
now I'm itching to install it and setup PureMessage builds on it
to play with dtrace... It is incredible! It is a really
revolutionary way to investigate systemic problems.
- Bryan hooked up with Wes Furlong (a PHP hacker), who added
function-entry and function-return probes to PHP. Then Bryan
created a simple php program, and we watched as dtrace printed out
all function entry/exits from php through libc all the way down to
the kernel. Incredible!
- Bryan has more explanation on his blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc

Preventing Crisis: Project Estimation and Tracking That Works
(Andy Lester)
- Same as the talk Andy gave at YAPC::NA. Andy also talked about
his new tool App-HWD, and gave Neil and I (those juggling Sophos
guys) huge props for the work we did during the week. Many people
were interested in the tool. After Andy's presentation, I demo'd
the new functionality we added.
- My contributions to this tool are my first real open source
contribution, and it was great to be thanked for it in they way we
were. Andy said, "Those Sophos guys are great friends to open
source."

Overall, it was a great time. I met lots of people, and learned lots of
new stuff.