Open Source Developers Conference - Day 1

Well it's that time of the year again, and one of the highlights of my year. Open Source Developers Conference Australia - this year just up the road in Brisbane.

The drive up from Gold Coast pretty slow. It's been a while since I drove up in peak hour. Train is much faster, but we needed the car to get the last few kms to Bardon.

The venue is right in the bush near Mt-Cootha.... nice spot. Bit far from the pubs and civilisation, but I am warming to it.

I set up an OSIA stand for the day - we didn't actually have a stand, but I put up some posters to give a bit of visibility. Gave away a lot of badges that CustomTees did for us - saw a few people wearing them or attached to their lanyards which was good. Everyone really liked my polo shirt I was wearing - so hopefully I am going to get some more made and give one to each member. Lots of people knew about OSIA, lot's didn't - a few people were very interesting in joining - and I have to live up to my promise of activity this year now! Watch this space.

The opening Keynote on Volunteers by Karen Pauley was really really interesting. I sat next to Paul O'Keeffe and had a lot to think about there in relation to Barcamp, Legion of Tech and the various groups we run. I found what she said about leaders so true - there are a lot of groups that rely on 1 person, if that person stops, then the group usually stops. We need to future-proof our groups so that they are sustainable... a lot of good things happening, but we need to keep them going.

Didn't get to many talks during the day as I kept stopping to chat to people, but I did make the effort to attend Paul Fenwick's talk about Perl awesomeness. While I don't code perl much anymore, it has helped me out of some tight spots in the past so I thought it worthy of a listen. Paul showed us "Moose" which is an extension to perl that brings some consistency to the language, especially OO perl. I find perl quite unreadably at times and it doesn't look anywhere near so bad with moose - in fact it looked a lot like ruby/groovy in places! Some things that Paul said were awesome are common place in Groovy - we take a lot for granted, and the benefit of hindsight has certainly made the dynamic languages that have come later better for it. Might give it a go on my next perl script (which isn't that often these days I'm afraid). Someone told me that Moose comes as standard in Perl 6.

Had a few corridor chats

• Jorke and Nick from MS. I keep bumping into those guys. While I don't use any Microsoft products and I personally like to evangelise open alternatives - really got to hand it to these guys, they engage well with the community and their customers. Talked a bit to them about developer support, MS does very well here - lot's of lessons to be learnt here - companies such as BEA (now Oracle) have dropped the ball (at least here in AU). Had a look at Jorke's touch screen - now I need one of these about 4 times the size for Greenhopper cardwall (and off course running Linux!)
• Caught up with Paul Wayper from LUGComms - had a good chat about LUGs particularly the way we introduce each other, welcome new members. Some lessons to be learnt from Toastmasters - they do an excellent job of welcoming new people, buddying up and mentoring.
• Bumped into James from OLPC project (saw his talk at Melbourne LCA, now employed by OLPC as test manager). I had no idea there was a new hardware rev of the XO... much better processor - good stuff. I need to find some use for the 5 units that I have in my garage, might just return them to the Library.... it's not fair me holding on to them. There is a new build of the XO image - so I'll be flashing my units when I get home and checking it out. Maybe we'll do one last push at the next GCLUG.

Paul Kings's talk on Agile development with Dynamic languages was very good, I had seen slides before buy not the talk. Everyone mentioned how much code there is in his presentations - he didn't give the slideshare link - maybe some people might like to look at the slides while he is presenting.

Missed all of Akash's talks - Sorry Akash! I really like hearing you speak - hats off to you on your preparation... I wish I was that disciplined.

Lightning talks - not the usual hilarious stuff, I'm sure some people are saving themselves for later in the week....Paul Fenwick will no doubt come up with a gem. I might do something if I can get my act together. Maybe a quick one on OSIA on Friday. I stood up briefly and plugged the Groovy BOF - one person did ask what Groovy was... I wrongly assumed everyone has heard of it. Assume nothing.

After the main sessions had finished we did a Groovy BOF in the main area. Not a bad turnout - consisted of most of the GGQ group + 2 guys from Canberra. Bob did a great demo of Twitterverse... awesome example of what can be done with Griffon.... 600 lines of code and that included the tests! Some good discussion on Grails maturity and adoption in the Enterprise. I am drawing names of attendees out of a hat for some (signed!) book giveaways tomorrow.

Finally the beer BOF. Off to "The Pado", had a good chat to a few people, too many to mention. Had a chat to Andrew McMillan who is on organising committee for LCA 2010 in Wellington. Sounds like it's going to be pretty awesome.... disappointed I can't go. Fingers crossed for the Brisbane bid in 2011.