OSCON 2008 — Day 4
I woke up in time to make about half of the keynotes, but from comments from some others last night, I decided to hang out in the hotel room before getting to the hall just to relax a little more. It’s was getting close to the end of the week, and my energy stores are flagging, but I’m still holding up well enough.
Skimmable Code: Fast to Read, Safe to Change
Presenter: Michael Schwern
This was a great talk about how to make code easier to read for code reviews. I was expecting information on formatting of code, but it went far beyond that simple scope. Michael went into great detail about variable names, function names, indentation (far beyond what I had considered in the past), use of functions, how to refactor a project in stages, different types of refactoring, and many other things. It was a great talk, and I came back with some great concepts and ideas that seem self-obvious now that I know them, but that I’ve never really thought of before in my 28 years of programming experience.
Integration Testing PHP Applications
Presenter: Mike Naberezny
This talk started out describing the difference between a unit test and integration testing, then got into briefly how to use PHPUnit and Selenium to accomplish this. There was more to the talk, but my gut started to rumble and be unhappy, so I had bail early. From the description of the session, I’m sure I missed some good stuff. I’m going to wait for the slides to appear, and then I’ll snag them to see if I can piece together the parts that I missed.
Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecInfo
Presenter: Edward Finkler
This was not what I expected walking in the door, but PHPSecInfo is similar to the phpinfo(); built in call, but it reports on system and PHP settings that may or may not be secure, and will tell you why the security of the system may be lacking. It’s a great way for system administrators (and QA!!!) to check system configurations. It’s also a great way for developers to check the security of their dev environment or the sites that they deploy too. Lastly, the end-user of a PHP application can use this to check to see if they meet certain system requirements or to check and see if their web hosting company is secure or not. It’s a great tool that is extensible for various things, and all of the checks can be easily configured. I talked with Edward a short bit after the session about other security related topics, and Purdue has a department (right word??) called CERIAS that deals with computer security in general. I told him about my education and goals as far as security goes, and he handed me some information and contact information on how they can help me, and how I can help them. It’s near the top of my list of things to check out when I return home.
Even Faster Web Sites
Presenter: Steve Souders
This session was a short extension to the one from last year that outlined 14 ways to improve front-end performance on a web application. 85% to 90% of a user’s wait time is experienced on the front-end, so this is the place to target for optimization (though the back-end can’t be ignored!) He presented 10 more rules (to go with the 14 from last year) to follow for improving performance, but due to time constraints, he only went into 3 of them. There is another book for web performance in the works (I have his first one) and I’m looking forward to seeing what it has to say when it is finished.
PDO: PHP Data Objects
Presenter: Wez Furlong
After speaking with Wez during his tutorial on Monday regarding some database issues that I was having, he suggested that I check out PDO. He didn’t mention his session for some reason, but I discovered it on the schedule Thursday morning. I was planning on attending Teenbuntu: Reaching Out to Teens as a show of support for Andrew Harris, but the PDO session was very important to my work, so I had to bail. I’m sorry Andrew! The session went well, and there was great starter information in there. I can’t wait to get the notes from the slides since it contained everything that I needed in them.
Somewhere in the middle of the sessions, I managed to make my way back to the Expo Hall a few times. I managed to get my Passport finished, and I found a few new services and products that were interesting enough for work and/or personal use. I have quite a bit of homework to do when I return home, which is the way it was last year. That’s fine with me. The more I learn about new things, the more effective I can be as an all-around, do-it-all-no-matter-what kind of computer geek. I also stopped by the O’Reilly booth, and asked who had the most t-shirts. They told me that I still had the record, though Tim O’Reilly himself does have more of them than I do. Hah! It took the owner/founder of the company to beat me. They said that his quantity doesn’t count, so I think I’ll end up with some sort of prize. They weren’t sure what it was yet, so I have no clue what I’ll end up snagging as extra schwag. I’m eager to learn what it is that I’ll pick up from them. It should be a very cool thing knowing O’Reilly!
The party of the night and the place to be in all of Portland was the Sourceforge Community Awards (SCA.) The party was as good as it was last year, with lots of ThinkGeek prizes via raffle (I didn’t win any of them) and some really cool people. I actually spent about half of the party (about 2 hours) getting a tattoo (see below.) Yep, I have a tattoo know. Please don’t change the locks on me before I get home!!! Once the tattoo was done, I got a few drinks and did some mingling. I was the “geek of the night” with my tattoo. There were a few other people that got tattoos courtesy of Sourceforge as well, but I was the first person to step up, I got the largest tattoo, and I (according to me and most everyone else) got the coolest tattoo of them all. After some drinks and mingling at the SCA, I headed down to a separate party called “Beerforge” that was an OK party. The problem was the music was too loud to have a decent conversation without yelling, and the place was really hot and muggy. After a single beer, I headed back down to the SCA, and hung out there until they kicked us all out. By the time I got back to the SCA, it was time to take the bandage off of my tattoo, and show it off to folks. My “geek cred” went up about a thousand notches from it all. If you want more info about the tat see my comments and photos below.
Schwag Count:
- 1 Meetup.com pen.
- 1 No Starch Press shot glass.
- Another Black Duck rubbery ducky.
- OpenSolaris Live CD with 2 books.
- 2 packs of Facebook gum. (And it’s good gum too!)
- 1 sticky note pad from XTuple.
- 10 more O’Reilly coasters to complete my collection.
- 1 SugarCRM calculator. (Which looks really cool!)
- 3 Ubuntu Hardy LTS Desktop pressed CDs.
- 2 Kubuntu Hardy Desktop pressed CDs.
- 25 stickers of various kinds.
- 1 OpSource LED flashlight and laser pointer combo.
- 11 different flyers, brochures, and similar items.
- 1 USB Flash drive (1 GB in size) from Intel. It contains quite a bit of information on it about their Moblin project.
- 1 Sourceforge t-shirt.
- 1 tux tattoo courtesy of SourceForge. (See below for details.)
- 1 Sourceforge bag with goodies in it. The goodies are listed below.
- 1 annoy-a-tron (Available on ThinkGeek.)
- 1 micro spy remote (Available on ThinkGeek.)
- 1 mini-cooper remote control car. (Available on ThinkGeek.)
- 1 bar of ShowerShock caffeinated soap. (Available on ThinkGeek.)
- 1 Linux Foundation bottle opener.
- 1 MoMa (Museum of Modern Art) luggage tag.
- 1 ThinkGeek catalog.
Schwag of the Day: The Schwag of the day (and probably of the entire confference!) is the tattoo of Tux the Penguin that SourceForge paid for. Yep. I finally have a tattoo, and it’s a great tattoo. There were tons of photos taken of it during the whole process, and as soon as they show up on the web, I’ll link to them. You can see a short interview with me (where I stumble for words a bit) just before the tattoo started. The video is here on YouTube.
Most Interesting/Unusual Person: Joe Bass, who did my tattoo, is a great guy and very interesting. He has two bachelor degrees, was once a professor of Latin (and a few other things) at a university, but he loved tattoos and art so much that he walked away from that life and became a tattoo artist. He’s a great guy, and tons of cool stories. Too bad he’s not local to me because I would definitely return to him for future work. If you’re in the Portland, OR area, I would high recommend his shop, Color Bomb Tattoo.
Best Quote of the Day: During the “name your variables better” section of the “skimmable code” session, Michael said, “$arg! The pirate variable!” to which most of the entire crowed growled out, “Aaarrggghhh!!!” Steve Jackson (of RPG fame, and a huge pirate aficionado) would have been so proud at the moment.
Without further delay… Here are the photos of my first ink!
