So I've arrived for my first OSCon in a couple years. Some thoughts:
The giveaways aren't as cool. Or at least, the bag doesn't seem as nice as the satchel from last time. Nitpicky to be sure. The meals and other amenities are just swell.
And a tip for those attending (or for myself attending next year): request a room in the East Wing of the hotel. The West Wing (despite the namesake tie-in) is a walk away and not quite as 'nice'. Further, according to this mention the rooms below floor 9 have no broadband (but since the 802.11 network is up, it may be a moot point).
The audience is largely unchanged. Still a the broad swath of people from varying walks of life; I've met the usual developers in the trenches, and even management types from some institutions of higher education.
O'Reilly still brings in the usual list of Internet 'luminaries' of course, who are recognisable. Which is one of the benefits of one of these sorts of conferences, as opposed to a mega-conf like JavaOne (I expect). This is nicely combined with the approachability of most of the people.
Oddly, ran into a former colleague from my days at Indiana University, who has relocated to DC, working for PBS building web sites for their children's programming. Seems like this happened in the last three years, just since the last time I saw him in Bloomington. Interestingly, it sounds like a big part of the job there is corralling the varying developers at each of the local stations to form a cohesive web site and development environment.
Tutorials attended: Intro to Python (too much to cover in three hours, yet less meat than anticipated) and Intro to XLST (meaty and well done).
note: need to upgrade to get trackback running...
Posted by esinclai at July 22, 2002 07:19 PM |