OSCON2004: Day 0 & 1
Jul. 27th, 2004 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yesthattomSunday: Flew in (extremely long flight, but no big issues) and hung out with Strata for dinner then went to my hotel room for a hot time of teaching her tricks she can do with her new Mac Powerbook. I love showing off OS X. The conference starts tomorrow.
Monday: Morning I spent talking with people and telecommuting, but now I wish I had attended the tutorial on Plone. Dang, I need someone to help me kickstart my plone project idea. Why does the good software make installation so difficult? In the afternoon I taught my tutorial. It was ok, but the small audience didn’t have the energy I’m used to. Afterwards I spoke with Ying and found out that she’s taking the job offer (w00t!) that she was thinking about. That’s really good. At night I went out to eat with a bunch of people from the conference (Googo, Ann, Tumi, Luke, Ronald, Alex). We went a long way by bus to discover that “The Pasta Place” (or something like that) sells pasta, they aren’t a restaurant. So we ended up at a brewpub across the street. I had a lot of interesting conversations about perl, open source, etc.
It’s so good to discover that an Open Source Conference isn’t full of conversations about whether or not open source is a good thing. I was expecting a couple RMS, Jr’s that just sit around arguing with people they agree with. Instead, these people are really serious about their perl, php, apache, etc. projects. An interesting cultural things I’ve noticed is that everyone asks “what do you do?” The first time I asked. I stumbled through, “well, I write books about system administration and blah blah blah”. Later I realized the expected answers are either “Perl”, “PHP”, or “I’m a journalist”.
And if you say “perl” the follow-up question is, “So, which CPAN module did you write?”
Wow, that’s pretty hard core.
People’s entire identity wrapped into a single word, with a possible subspecifier that identifies how you’ve helped the community.
I’ve been thinking about responding with something like “/bin/sh” or “awk” because it’s true. I’m a better perl programmer than 90% of the perl programmers I know, but I kick ass on /bin/sh in ways that sometimes surprise myself. However, for now I’ve been saying, “System administration.”
Monday: Morning I spent talking with people and telecommuting, but now I wish I had attended the tutorial on Plone. Dang, I need someone to help me kickstart my plone project idea. Why does the good software make installation so difficult? In the afternoon I taught my tutorial. It was ok, but the small audience didn’t have the energy I’m used to. Afterwards I spoke with Ying and found out that she’s taking the job offer (w00t!) that she was thinking about. That’s really good. At night I went out to eat with a bunch of people from the conference (Googo, Ann, Tumi, Luke, Ronald, Alex). We went a long way by bus to discover that “The Pasta Place” (or something like that) sells pasta, they aren’t a restaurant. So we ended up at a brewpub across the street. I had a lot of interesting conversations about perl, open source, etc.
It’s so good to discover that an Open Source Conference isn’t full of conversations about whether or not open source is a good thing. I was expecting a couple RMS, Jr’s that just sit around arguing with people they agree with. Instead, these people are really serious about their perl, php, apache, etc. projects. An interesting cultural things I’ve noticed is that everyone asks “what do you do?” The first time I asked. I stumbled through, “well, I write books about system administration and blah blah blah”. Later I realized the expected answers are either “Perl”, “PHP”, or “I’m a journalist”.
And if you say “perl” the follow-up question is, “So, which CPAN module did you write?”
Wow, that’s pretty hard core.
People’s entire identity wrapped into a single word, with a possible subspecifier that identifies how you’ve helped the community.
I’ve been thinking about responding with something like “/bin/sh” or “awk” because it’s true. I’m a better perl programmer than 90% of the perl programmers I know, but I kick ass on /bin/sh in ways that sometimes surprise myself. However, for now I’ve been saying, “System administration.”
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no subject
Date: 2004-07-27 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-27 04:56 pm (UTC)I would love to see the info about plone... are they going to make the tutorials available?