Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 23 Jul 2007 22:21:00 GMT
I just arrived in Portland for OSCON. I’ll be wandering around most of the week, but if anyone really wants to flag me down, either send me mail at scott@sigkill.org, or drop by the Google booth either Wednesday or Thursday morning.
Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 21 Jul 2006 23:49:27 GMT
I’m headed for OSCON in Portland next week, along with about half of my blogroll. I’m heading down to Portland on Sunday via Amtrak’s afternoon run; if anyone else is taking the same train, feel free to stop by and say hi. I’ll be the guy in business class editing Ruby code with TextMate on a 17” PowerBook.
Monday and Tuesday are tutorial days at OSCON; I’m going to be sitting in on Amy’s Javascript tutorial on Monday morning, followed by tutorials on Linux drivers, Haskell, and web testing.
The rest of my schedule is still in flux. Here’s the bits that are nailed down:
Leave a comment if there are any talks that I really shouldn’t miss.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 17 May 2006 18:35:38 GMT
I’m signed up for two conferences this summer–Gnomedex in Seattle in late June, and OSCON in Portland in late July.
I’m looking forward to both conferences. I’ve never been to Gnomedex before, but I’ve been kicking myself for missing the past two years, and decided months ago that I wouldn’t miss this year’s conference. Besides, I owe Chris for buying me dinner last summer, so the least I can do is attend his conference.
OSCON is another conference that I’ve never quite managed to attend. I drove down for ”FOSCON” last year, when the Portland Ruby Group had most of the OSCON Ruby speakers give their talks for free. I had a really good time, but I couldn’t afford to take the week off and attend the real OSCON conference. Fortunately, Google is going to have a big presence there, so I get to spend a week at the conference in exchange for spending a bit of time pretending to be a recruiter. Feel free to ask me about working for Google :-).
I have one question for readers who have been to OSCON before–it is worth staying in the official conference hotel, the Doubletree in Lloyd Center? Unfortunately, the Doubletree isn’t actually all that close to the conference center, and I’d hate to spend a lot of time commuting back and forth between the hotel and the convention center. For FOSCON last year, I stayed at the Jupiter Hotel which was really cool. I’ve also stayed at the Red Lion a block or so from the convention center. The Jupiter and Red Lion are both closer to the conference, and the Jupiter is just cooler. The big thing about conferences is that the conference sessions themselves aren’t really all that important–everything interesting really happens in the hallways and afterhours during BoFs. So, does anything actually happen at the Hotel during OSCON, or is everything at the convention center?
Posted by Scott Laird Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:23:00 GMT
It’s OSCON season, and most of the open-source world has descended on Portland for the week. This includes most of the leaders of the Ruby community, so the Portland Ruby Group held their own “Free OSCON” night at FreeGeek. Four of the people giving Ruby talks at OSCON gave their talks for free at FOSCON, and most of the rest of the Ruby speakers were there lurking in the back of the room, including Dave Thomas and Matz.
I dragged my trusty D60 along and took a few pictures, along with a few notes.
The first speaker was David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and O’Reilly’s “Hacker of the Year” for 2005. He basically gave us his 15-minute OSCON keynote on Rails, which was both a brief introduction and a marketing talk for Rails. His big theme was “flexibility is overrated”–by reducing the number of ways that you can approach web development, Rails makes it enormously easier to actually get things done.
When David’s talk was complete, our host Phil (Tomson, I presume) presented him with a vintage copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People.
This was deeply cool. Rich Kilmer gave a brief presentation on his current project, ActionStep, a port of OS X’s Cocoa API to Flash. Right now, there are free tools that can create Flash .swf files, but Macromedia’s licensing keeps them from legally using any of Flash’s windowing tools. So Rich decided to write his own windowing toolkit, using NextStep/Cocoa API. They’re over halfway done, and expect to release the first complete version before the end of 2005.
I’m not particularly fond of flash, so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention until Rich started showing off his ideas for Rails integration. He’s building a layer that will glue his Flash front end to a Rails back end, and the demo code that he presented made it look even easier then creating HTML forms for user interaction. I’m not sure that it’ll be something that I’ll ever end up using, but it looked deeply cool. Here are a couple screenshots:
Next up, Glenn Vanderburg gave a talk on metaprogramming in Ruby. He showed how Ruby itself uses metaprogramming to implement things like attr_accessor, and then showed how people have used and extended Ruby over the years. One theme was the continuing development of metaprogramming idioms in Ruby; he showed how things have changed over the years, starting with an X protocol wrapper that someone wrote years ago, through Rich Kilmer’s Java debug protocol system, and up through Rails. Ruby’s metaprogramming ability is one of the things that makes Rails so successful–the ability to extend the language to let you say things like:
class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :categories
has_many :comments
belongs_to :user
...
endThis is one of the things that makes Rails so useful and so much fun to program.
Finally, Why The Lucky Stiff came on stage. Why (or sometimes _why) is sort of the rock star of the Ruby world. His real identity is a closely guarded secret. He’s the author of why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby, which is easily the strangest programming book that I’ve ever seen.
His FOSCON talk was sort of a performance-art interpretation of his book.
We knew that interesting things were afoot when he showed up with a backup band, and we had to stop for a break while they set up on stage.
Once that bit was done, they launched into song. Why had a nice little piece that was essentially the Ruby lexer set to music. “A symbol starts with a colon and is followed by lowercase letters and numbers! A constant is composed of capital letters and underscores!”
This sort of thing went on for a while. He alternated between animated segments on the projector, demonstrations of distributed Ruby programming (with audience participation), singing about Ruby, and utter non-sequiturs.
Why’s presentation ended with the immortal words “stop her, she’s stealing our eigenclasses.”
Thanks to Phil and everyone else from the Portland Ruby group, and all of the presenters for giving us a very memorable and enlightening night. I have a few more pictures on Flickr, if anyone’s interested.
Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 02 Aug 2005 19:00:43 GMT
Work isn’t paying for OSCON this year, but one advantage of living in Seattle is that it’s close enough to Portland to be able to drive down for the day. So, I’m going to head down Wednesday afternoon for the Portland Ruby group’s FOSCON talks, and then hang around for a few hours Thursday morning before driving back for work.
It looks like several of the Ruby people with OSCON talks will be giving their talks for FOSCON as well, so it should be interesting. I suspect it’ll turn into a big Ruby BoF; that’s reason enough to drive down.
