OSCON Day 3 : The Party is in Full Swing

p. !

p. Theo and I discussed topics ranging from hiring practices to scalable applications. If he hadn't had a session he had to teach, I would probably still be sitting there talking to him. Theo is a fascinating person to talk to. I'll get his interview up soon so you can enjoy it.

p. The exhibit hall opened up for the first time today and you know what that means...SWAG! "Laura Thomson's T-Shirt Index":http://laurat.blogs.com/random_ramblings/2006/07/oscon_day_1_the.html measurement of the industry should indicate that this coming year will be a good one for tech. I counted at least 10 vendors giving out T-Shirts. Microsoft was so aggressive in their distribution that they were out in the main hallway foisting them on anyone who made eye contact. opengarden.org so far had the most suggestive with "I sowed my seed at OSCON". Hmmmm.....ok. Maybe that's foreshadowing of their party later in the evening.

p. !http://static.flickr.com/69/199199370_6708640dfa_t.jpg! The session of note yesterday for PHPers (there were many good sessions, this was just the best one I attended) was the PHP Lightening Talks moderated by Laura Thomson. Anybody who wanted to could get up and give a 5 minute presentation on any PHP related subject. At 5 minutes Laura pushed them off the stage and moved to the enxt speaker. Of the many great presentations that were given, the one that stands out was Zac Greant’s. Zac was the only presenter with “Manual PowerPoint Slides”. (3×5 Notecards) He got up and rattled off the problems he sees with PHP. It was a great presentation.

p. !

p. The day ended, as all good conference days do, with a string of parties. First the vendor reception in the Exhibit Hall. Everybody got together, ate the food and wandered around trying to ask intelligent questions to vendors as the effects of the alcohol slowly set in. From there I wandered over to the “PHP Security Hoedown” moderated by Ed Finkler. Ed presented his new tool that looks like phpinfo() but really runs about 16 security checks on your system and presents the results to you. Very nice and there’s even talk of him writing a version for the “Zend Framework”:http://framework.zend.com.

p. Finally, Aaron Fulkerson and the crew from “mindtouch”:http://www.mindtouch.com (the guys behind “opengarden.org”:http://www.opengarden.org) threw a bash to launch to launch their new product DekiWiki. After that everybody migrated up to Nathan Torkington’s suite to wind down. Wow, what a day.