OSCON Wrap-up
OSCON is my favorite conference these days. I love it because it brings so many diverse people under a single umbrella for a week. For a week we can get together and experience new ideas from different communities and avoid the group-think in specialized technology conferences.
Some of my highlights of the week were:
Simon Peyton-Jones. He's a fabulous presenter, and had us stretching our minds for many hours throughout the conference. You can download the slides from his Taste of Haskell talk from the OSCON presentations page. Click the image below to see a video of Simon's Software Transactional Memory talk from the conference:
Karl Fogel. I met Karl accidentally at the very end of the conference while hanging out with Laurent Sansonetti. I am a big fan of Karl's Producing Open Source Software book, and I was surprised to hear that he had left Google to create a new non-profit organization to campaign for copyright reform in the US. Karl and Rick Falvinge of the Pirate Party had some very interesting things to say about the erosion of fundamental rights brought on by recent actions by copyright holders.
Ben Fry. I had no idea what he did before this conference, but his demo of his work on Processing absolutely blew me away. Check out this video from his talk:
I spent quite a lot of time hanging out with folks from the Ruby community at the conference. The response was overwhelmingly positive on our new-found ability to build a accept contributions back into our IronRuby project. This really charges me up to begin the next phase of our project, where we will build out the IronRuby community so that we can accelerate the pace of the project. I can't wait!
Since I was already in Portland, I had a chance to give some other talks. On Tuesday night, I gave a 10 minute lightning talk on IronRuby at FOSCON 2007. It was held at a very funky bar called Holocene, which was a great location. Next year, though it would be really great if we could stand in front of the audience to give our talks :) The audience faced one way, and the presenter faced the other way, as you can see from the photo below:
On Thursday night, immediately after my OSCON talk, I went to give a talk at the Portland Area .NET User Group. It was held at the offices of Corillian, where Scott Hanselman currently works. I really enjoyed talking to this group; there was plenty of time for Q&A, unlike OSCON where talks were limited to only 45 minutes. I even got a chance to see Scott's shrink-wrapped copy of DOS 4.01!
This was a fantastic trip. Thanks to everyone who took the time out to talk to me. I really enjoyed our conversations, and I'm looking forward to next year!
We, of course, recorded your talk and I checked out the video this weekend and it looks great...High Def 720p. I don't think I have the bandwidth to host it at that high-res so I'll probably down-sample it to 480p and try to get it up as a Silverlight Streaming Video on Monday or Tues.
Posted by: Scott Hanselman | July 29, 2007 at 01:18 AM
John,
Any chance of getting a video, along with any slides, of your talk posted?
Posted by: Tony | July 29, 2007 at 02:40 AM
Sorry about the weird setup at FOSCON, that was not something we realized until we got there on Tuesday to set up. That is, no one told me about it it, anyway. Next year you can be sure it will NOT be that way. ;~)
Also, we recorded video of the talks, but I'm not sure what the status is of those. I'm waiting to find out, but when I do, I'll send you (and all the other speakers) the relevant links.
Thanks again for coming!
Posted by: Thomas Lockney | July 29, 2007 at 08:26 AM
@Tony: Hopefully Scott will get that video out soon.
@Thomas: at the PADNUG meeting that Scott recorded, we couldn't connect my Mac to the projector. We did a terminal server session between his laptop and mine, and we projected off his laptop instead. That was something we could have tried at FOSCON, but I was worried about all of the moving parts :)
Posted by: John Lam | July 29, 2007 at 02:49 PM
John, it was great talking to you after the conference, I really enjoyed it too. Rick Falkvinge and I just got back (today) from a lunchtime talk at Creative Commons in downtown San Francisco (with many EFF.org people in attendance). His message really got through, and the crowd asked some of the best questions we've had so far, probing the corner cases of the Pirate Party's platform.
On a completely unrelated note: +1 on the Simon Peyton Jones fan club! His talk was one of the highlights for me too.
Posted by: Karl Fogel | July 30, 2007 at 04:38 PM
Here's the video of John presenting IronRuby at PADNUG.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SilverlightVideoOfJohnLamOnIronRubyAtPADNUG.aspx
Posted by: Scott Hanselman | July 31, 2007 at 11:07 PM
John,
Any chance the OSCON talk where you fix the 1/3.0 bug is shown?
The one Scott posted from PADNUG was very good, would like to see some others.
-Rob
Posted by: Rob Bazinet | August 02, 2007 at 12:23 PM