OSCON WRapup: The Party's Over
The goddess’ of the O’Reilly Conference Team have yelled “cut” the set is struck and everybody has gone home. Speakers are busily reviewing the evaluation forms and tuning their presentations for the next round and the attendees are sorting through the T-Shirts. (Keepers or dust-rags) Let’s glance over our shoulder at what was OSCON06.
First, some pictures. My Flickr stream for OSCON06 is located here. As is evident by the pictures, I’m not a photographer. I did however, manage to capture some pictures of some new friends, and things that made me laugh. Take them for what they are, just my view of the world.
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I didn’t get to attend all the sessions I wanted to and the ones I did attend I was busy scribbling notes for a post here or taking a breather before hustling off to the next one. Knowledge did manage to seep into my caffeine soaked gray-matter. Rasums’ session and George Schlossnagle’s are the two that come to mind as the most informative.
“PHP Lightening Talks” was by far the most entertaining. The topics ranged from Ed Finkler showing off his cool new security tool for PHP, to Marcus Borger’s highly entertaining “What Do You Want To Talk About?” Laura did a great job of moderating and keeping the session on track. After the first couple of sessions, it was obvious that if you went long, she would simply bull-doze you off the stage. (Which she did to the great surprise of her husband, Luke Welling!) Next year somebody has got to bring a video recorder to this one!
The Exhibitor’s hall was open on Wednesday and Thursday and I got to meet even more people, like the guy from phpMyAdmin. Zend booth was always hopping mainly because John Herron knows how to attract a crowd. Mark di Visser, Chief Marketing Officer of Zend, was there in the trenches with us talking to customers and potential customers. Of course John, John ,Mark and myself would have been utterly lost without help from Dhwani.
As far as the conference itself was concerned, I can’t think of a single technical glitch or snafu. I’m sure there were some but the team from O’Reilly hid them well. The only thing I noticed was the poor guys form OSCAMP had to keep moving to a different room. It’d be nice if the conference team could nail them down to a single room and let them play there.
Oh yes, there is the matter of the PHP Trading cards. Contrary to popular opinion, these were not a “Who’s Who” of PHP. They were simply a memory device to help me put faces with the names of people I had interviews with. If you are so curious that you just have to see them, they are spread out over 5 Word documents. I’ve posted them for your amusement. This set includes the rare George Schlossnagle card with the Zak Graent picture on it. That’s a collector’s item, you may want to save it. You can download them here:
If anyone is interested in making their own, they started life as the Bazooka Joe template from HP. I modified them a little to fit my needs. They were printed on 60lb stock with my Epson R200 and there are only 2 original sets in existence. (and I may have lost one of them on my way home!) :)
Well, that’s it for OSCON06. I still have several interviews that I’ll be posting in the coming weeks. People like Laura Thomson, Marcus Borger and Joyce Park who will share with us some of their background as well as the interesting things they are working on. Check back often, you won’t want to miss them.
=C=
Comments
Easy there, Finkler.