What a whirlwind week at OSCON! I'm still spinning and trying to catch up on sleep the day after getting back home from my first O'Reilly conference experience.
For me, the main themes this week were Java, Ruby, Ajax/Remote scripting and Subversion. I have some skeleton outline notes from several more talks that I'll put online shortly at my OPML blog. I'm still too overwhelmed to form these into fully coherent thoughts, and each could easily generate multiple blog postings.
Off the top of my head, here are a few random thoughts that were floating through my head this week:
- If you want to meet the best hackers in the world, come to OSCON. Open source programmers are the most passionate of their kind, and where there's passion there's intelligence, community and great ideas.
- If you want to hire the best hackers in the world, come to OSCON. The networking opportunities are absolutely incredible -- I was blown away. Now actually convincing a hacker to come work for you is a different story. It would help if your business had some kind of open source strategy, so that the hacker can continue to participate in the community and give back what he or she works on at your company. Non-open-sourcers will find it unreal, but it is possible to contribute to an open source community and still receive a lot of business ROI from the exchange. Paul Graham is quite possibly the most articulate speaker you could find on this subject. I was at his What Business Can Learn From Open Source keynote and it immediately struck me as great fodder for discussion at the cube farms back at work.
- Damian Conway is an evil genius. And his arch nemesis may be Danny O'Brien.
- As I mentioned it was my first time at OSCON, and I was really surprised to find the whole OSCON community extremely friendly and receptive. I never sensed any elitist attitudes (not that there probably aren't any here or there) and never felt like an outsider. To me, it's important that the community retain this sense of welcoming and open-ness so that we can further the cause and be better positioned to promote change for good in the world.
- Ruby is a super cool language, but it's not a panacea. There is still lots of room for growth in the language. During Matz's talk he mentioned that he wants to implement a sealing feature of some kind so that some Ruby code could be locked down or scoped to a single file only (unlike the current implementation where you can change any class, anywhere, on the fly). Ruby still seems a year or two away from fuller adoption in the enterprise, although that's not going to stop me from trying to use it.
- Likewise, Java's not dead either. The same players in the Java open source community are around and are still committed to the language. However, the politics can tend to get a bit more ugly.
- Subversion is ready for primetime and I can't wait to roll it out at work.
Like I said, my head is still reeling and my blood still pumping after a high-octane week. I'm looking forward to stepping up my involvment in the open source community and I hope to maintain contact with all the folks I had the pleasure of meeting during the conference. Cheers!
3:27:27 PM 
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