What a time! Here is a quick summary and overall impressions of the conference.

My Talks

Both of my talks, the Dependency Injection In Dynamic Languages and the 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know about Ruby, went well. Evidently, they were turning people away form the door for the “10 Things” talk (the room was small).

Both Howard Lewis Ship (of HiveMind) and Paul Hammant (of PicoContainers) attended the dependency injection talk. Howard pointed out a limitation in constructing object graphs with cycles in the current DIM implementation. Hivemind fixes that by introducing proxy objects. I’m wondering if DIM can do it without proxies. I’ll post later on this.

Ruby at OSCON

Ruby, and in particular Ruby on Rails, was getting a lot of notice at the conference. Here’s some items that come to mind.

• In the keynote talk on O’Reilly’s Radar project where O’Reilly tries to keep a finger on what’s up and comming, Tim and Nat see Ruby on Rails as possibly the “Perl of Web 2.0”.
• Both of Monday’s Tutorials on Ruby and Rails were very well attended. Several of the Ruby sessions on Thursday played to standing room only croweds.
• David Heinemeyer Hannson’s keynote talk on the Secrets of Ruby on Rails did a good job of highlighting the philosophy behind the framework.
• In his keynote talk “On Evil”, Danny O’Brian described the Gandhi method of preventing evil: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Danny noted that most groups haven’t figured out how to move from one state to another, and that the actual sequence is a bit more complicated than the simple progression laid out by the maxim. In particular Ruby seems to have gone directly from the “ignore” state to the “win” state in about 3 weeks.
• Why’s talk, “A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever” would have been sold out, but O’Reilly moved it at the last minute to the main ballroom and ran it during the afternoon break. Although plagued with some technical difficulties (such as the projection screen placed where Why couldn’t see the screen, and missbehaving mplayer sessions), the presentation had the whole room rolling on the floor. Why is going to upload the videos to his Redhanded website in the near future, make sure you check them out. Did anyone record the Thirsty Cups’ rendition of the “Ruby Syntax Song” or “May I Recommend Ruby”?

OSCON in General

I really enjoyed a number of keynote talks. Here’s some of the memorable ones:

• TCP/IP and Shipping containers by Nick Gall. Yes, what do shipping containers and the TCP/IP protocol have in common? Nick compared the two and tried to come up with the characteristics of a technology that has potential for long term viability.

• Computational Origami: From Flapping Birds to Space Telescopes by Robert Lang. Who would have thought that Origami was so fascinating. Evidently, recent advances in using computers to compute the crease patterns of Origami patterns has yielded designs that were thought impossible just a few years ago. Check out Robert’s site.

• Open Source Biology by Drew Endy. Drew highlighted how many of the basic building blocks in DNA research are being patented and impending inovation in that field.

• Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt. Dick gets extra points for not only a interesting talk, but getting his point across in a fast paced, well written monologue that didn’t let your eyes wander from the screen for fear of missing something.

• HowToons by Saul Griffith. Check this stuff out. It’s great!

I’m not going to write up all the sessions I sat in on, but here are a couple of things that I found interesting.

• I sat in a on Advanced Groovy talk by Rod Cope. I’ve not been following Groovy recently. I see the syntax has been refined a bit since the last time I looked at it. Rod claims that performance is now 20% to 90% of Java, quite a bit faster than the last time I looked. Ruby’s Builder::XmlMarkup (which is available as part of Rails) was stolen directly from ideas in the Groovy community, so keeping an eye on Groovy is definitly worthwhile.

• If you ever get a chance to see Mark-Jason Dominus give a talk, take advantage of the opportunity. I’ve been a long time fan of his Presentation Judo talk. OSCON was the first chance I had to hear him in person. I caught part of his Making Programs Faster and his Friday session on You Can’t Get There from Here.

Non-OSCON Stuff

Portland is great. The public transportation here is outstanding and the city is wonderful. While I have been attending OSCON, my wife has been exploring the city and its many gardens and museums. After OSCON closed, Helen and I went had a late lunch in the Chinese quarter and then hopped on over to Powell’s city of books. Powell’s is a bookstore covering an entire city block. Heh, they give you a map when you enter the store. I could have spend hours there ... well, hey, I guess I did.

On Monday, Helen and I took a tour of the Breedlove Guitar Company, a small guitar company near Bend, Oregon. (Did I mention I own a Breedlove guitar? ... wonderful instrument). It was a four hour drive from Portland, but it was well worth it. I took plenty of pictures there and will probably write up the Breedlove tour in more detail later.

Today, Helen and I will be puttering around Portland a bit more, then start back to Cincinnati on Sunday.