OSCON: Tuesday night, Wednesday keynotes

Last night's keynotes were Mark Shuttleworth (Mr. Ubuntu), Robert Lefkowitz, and Damian Conway.

Shuttleworth spoke without slides, bouncing back and forth between technical and community issues. Conway was, um..., indescribable. Quantum computing, special and general relativity, and some hilariously funny and totally faked Perl demos illustrating "positronic variables" that get set backwards in time.

Lefkowitz was the most interesting: he talked about software development methodology, using Quintilian's Instititutio Oratoria as a framework. The interesting thing about the open source process (in his version, which I don't necessarily agree with) is that it starts with a commit to version control, and includes users. There's no requirements phase; it's replaced by bug reports and feature requests.

Right now I'm in the morning keynotes; I'm probably not going to have much time to blog. Tim O'Reilly just came onstage. This is the 10th OSCon, and the 12th anniversary of the first Perl conference, which I attended in San Jose.

Net's getting laggy. *cheery wave*

Travel notes

The continental breakfast was down in the exhibit hall this morning; I bagged it and went back to the hotel for something with protein and potassium (i.e. hash browns).

I don't really like eating alone, though. Grabbed coffee and conversation back at the conference; the hotel may have bacon and eggs, but the con has melon and Charbuck's. Need both.

OSCon: Wednesday afternoon

Well, so much for keeping a trip report up to date in realtime. I'm taking real-time notes in a text file; I *might* be able to upload them to steve.savitzky.net. They'll probably still be text. Yeah, I could probably cut-and-paste them into LJ, but that's a manual process and it ain't gonna happen.

Lunch with webmaven (*waves*) and several other good conversations. I'm starting to have the same problem here that I have at filk cons: the hallway conversations are more fun than the sessions now. That's probably a Good Thing.