Joey Lawrance, Mike Miller, and I went to OSCON this past Wednesday and Thursday. It was a blast. We decided to go since it was nearby (in Portland) and free (exhibit hall only.) Even without the keynotes and workshops it was still a blast. The best part about the conference was that we talked one-on-one with many developers and advocates in the open source community.
OSCON was different than other conferences I've been to (eg. JavaOne, E3). Instead of having some marketing/PR person give you a slick talk about how wonderful their product is, many of the people manning the booths were volunteers, developers, or the company founders. Everyone was excited just to tell you how cool their project is. The most excited people were the ones not selling anything--they simply wanted to know about their project so you could go and download it. It was great.
Of course, no conference is complete with out swag. And boy did I get some cool swag. At the top of the list, I got a free Perl shirt which I had autographed by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Damian Conway, Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and Brian D Foy. It was awsome to meet them and get their autographs! Since I was wearing my JavaOne backpack, the Sun rep just up and gave me a wireless network finder and a retractable network cable. Very cool! I also got a great shirt from No Starch Press and had a great talk with the founder. (Look for a future review of "Silence on the Wire." I'm reading it right now.) I bought a PostgreSQL pin and put it on my backpack. I have a Gentoo sticker on my notebook. I have a mini swiss army knife from the Perl folks. And I have more swag I won't bother mentioning. I'm all decked out.
Wednesday night was a blast. Patrick Mochel had a BBQ at his house in place of the regular kernel hackers meeting. Greg K-H invited Joey, Mike, and myself to come along. (We know Greg from his visits to the OSULUG.) It was a mix of a few kernel hackers and a lot of their friends. It was funny when I mentioned Linux and one of the friends rolled his eyes and walked off because it was the last thing he wanted to hear about (not being a hacker himself.) In the end, I spent most of the evening talking to Jeff Waugh (the Gnome release manager) about Gnome, life in Australia, and Ubuntu (yes, he works for Canonical.) Jeff was a blast to talk to, and it was fascinating to hear his story about how he got involved in the Gnome community (hint: it wasn't because he was an awsome programmer.)
All-in-all, I expect an OSCON repeat next year. I can hardly wait!
Posted by enigma at August 10, 2005 10:40 PM