OSCON — Day 3
NOTE: This all happened yesterday, but I didn’t get a chance to write this until today.
I started the day a little late, so I missed the first keynote or two. I sat in on the rest, but they really weren’t all that great. The Q&A started about the time the expo hall opened up for the first day of the expo hall. I decided to skip the Q&A because I didn’t really care about it. I ran off to the expo hall, and started collecting brochures, flyers, business cards, t-shirts, pens, and tons of other stuff. I got a purple bag from Yahoo that I managed to fill to the brim.
It was great. It was so great that I got wrapped up in meeting new people that I missed my first two sessions. I missed Practical Design for Web Developers, and PHP Security: Fact and Fiction. I wish I had made it to the web design class, but I was talking to a guy later, and he said that there really wasn’t much to learn in there. He said that the O’Reilly Ajax Design Patterns covered it all. I have that book, so nothing lost. I also wish I had made it to the PHP Security: Fact and Ficion, so that I could meet Andi Gutmas. That didn’t happen though. I was complaining about this later that night at a Sun Microsystems party, and there was another guy there that had made it. He said that Rasmus covered it all, and covered it better in his PHP Bigger and Faster session. I made it to that session, so I didn’t miss anything.
We had lunch (free again!) and, I kept hitting the expo hall. More people, more stuff, some great ideas, and more fun. I ended up joining the Free Software Foundation while I was there. I’ve always wanted to support them, and I finally found a way. It was more expo hall stuff until 1:45 when I hit a Nagios session. I got a list of good configuration management applications, but I got nothing else out of it. I’ll make sure to give the list to Shinto when I get back to the office. Immediately after that I went to Rasmus’ PHP: Bigger and Faster. That was a great session! I learned a TON about profiling PHP applications, speeding up Apache, and doing some great things to make applications load faster. Like always, Rasmus was fun, and he really know his stuff. I had an hour to kill, so I just hung out and relaxed for a bit before heading back to the expo hall. More meeting people, getting stuff, swapping business cards, and learning about new features, products, organizations, and companies.
Later that afternoon were two sessions in the same room back-to-back that really tied together. One was High-performance JavaScript: Why Everything You’ve Been Taught is Wrong, and the other was High Performance Web Pages. There was some overlap between the two, but very little. They really reinforced each other, and I came away with some great notes about how to improve front-end performance on web delivery. A stat that I learned that I found surprising was that 80%-90% of all waiting time that the user experiences is from the front-end. I’ve always done my best to optimize my back-end thinking that I was doing something good. Sure, it was good, but if you cut the back-end in half, you’re cutting, at most, 10% of the time off.
The expo hall reception followed that. Yep. You guessed it. More people, stuff, ideas, and good talks. The expo hall was fun, but it was also very, very valuable. I’m glad I spent so much time there.
After that, there were two BoFs that I had planned to attend, but I was tired from walking around all day. There were two parties that I had been invited to that night, so I decided that it was time to relax without my backpack and purple Yahoo bag. I dropped them off at the hotel, stripped out of my sweaty t-shirt and threw on my brand new Mozilla Foundation t-shirt, and headed out to the Mozilla party. I got there after walking about 9 blocks. I thought it was closer, but that’s ok. I had a drink there, and listened to Menomana (yeah, like from the Muppets) for a few songs. They were good, but they were too mellow for me. The music was loud, and I wanted to talk to more people. That made me decide to bail after only one drink (plus the drinks were expensive, not free.) I ran into a couple of guys from Car Domain. They were staying in my hotel, and wanted to go to the Sun Microsystems party. I was headed that way too, and they had a car! They offered to give me a ride (I didn’t even have to ask) and I readily accepted. We drove back to the hotel, and then walked the four blocks to the Sun party. It was in the parking garage of a nearby hotel, and they had carpeted the floors. They were playing beer pong, Big Wheel races, and had an ok techno DJ playing music at a good level. They had a bar where the beer was free, but the mixed drinks were not. That’s ok. I like beer better. I hung out, talked to people, made a few more contacts, and drank some beer. I also got to talk to some Google people, and I gave them grief for buying our competitor instead of us. It was all in good fun, though. They actually told me that the public found out about the information before they did. Wow.
It was late when I got tired, so I headed the four blocks back to the hotel, set my alarms for 9 AM the next morning, and went to bed. I knew that I would be missing the keynotes, but they were so lame from the first morning’s keynotes that I didn’t figure that I would be missing much.
