OSCON is a very interesting meeting. Apart from opportunities to meet old friends and acquaintances, and talk to people like Damian Conway and Toby Segaran, and having a very productive conference, one also gets to get a pulse on some trends, more on this in a bit.
Also please to find some life science types here, including people from Pfizer and 454. I still feel that one sign that academia and even commercial life science companies don’t quite get it when it comes to software development and engineering is that while we are quick to travel to any number of scientific conference, the attendance at programming and technology-centric conferences is limited. Which means you miss out on talks about XMPP and how it can be use to power and scale web services, and learn about the open web, etc.
XMPP is definitely making its presence felt at OSCON. I only got a chance to attend one talk, where XMPP was essentially presented as an alternative to REST, assuming that SOAP was so bad that you wanted to avoid it and REST had limitations. I won’t go into that argument (other than agreeing on the SOAP bit), but twitter chatter suggested that there was a lot of discussion around XMPP.
It’s also interesting to see the level of interest in things like memcached and the importance of community. I also found it interesting to observe the differences between the crowd at OSCON and at other geek-tech conferences. There’s a number of people here, not a large number, but enough, who are not quite web aware. That surprised me a little.
Anyway, all I have time for right now. More later.
After a long day at OSCON
OSCON is a very interesting meeting. Apart from opportunities to meet old friends and acquaintances, and talk to people like Damian Conway and Toby Segaran, and having a very productive conference, one also gets to get a pulse on some trends, more on this in a bit.
Also please to find some life science types here, including people from Pfizer and 454. I still feel that one sign that academia and even commercial life science companies don’t quite get it when it comes to software development and engineering is that while we are quick to travel to any number of scientific conference, the attendance at programming and technology-centric conferences is limited. Which means you miss out on talks about XMPP and how it can be use to power and scale web services, and learn about the open web, etc.
XMPP is definitely making its presence felt at OSCON. I only got a chance to attend one talk, where XMPP was essentially presented as an alternative to REST, assuming that SOAP was so bad that you wanted to avoid it and REST had limitations. I won’t go into that argument (other than agreeing on the SOAP bit), but twitter chatter suggested that there was a lot of discussion around XMPP.
It’s also interesting to see the level of interest in things like memcached and the importance of community. I also found it interesting to observe the differences between the crowd at OSCON and at other geek-tech conferences. There’s a number of people here, not a large number, but enough, who are not quite web aware. That surprised me a little.
Anyway, all I have time for right now. More later.
Related articles by Zemanta