Thursday, July 17, 2003 10:15 PM
I attended at the O’Reilly Perl Conference in Portland, Oregon.
Once again everybody had a great time. It’s great rekindling friendships that spark up annually at the conference with people from different states and countries.
The hotel conference rooms were a little small for some talks, and the wireless AP was flaky, but the talks were interesting as always. And Portland is beautiful, kind of rustic and situated next to a large river, a nice place to eat lunch.
I went to the Bricolage and Postgres BOFs. Like usual, people were impressed by the power of Bricolage. Postgres people outlined coming support for 2 important features, Windows support (required by Bruce Momjian’s sponsor in Japan) and replication. Much whining over mindshare of MySQL, mostly underestimating its feature progress.
Some of the talks I went to included Casey West’s really good anti-spam talk about Perl and Spam Assassin, the “MySQL And Progress Toward The SQL Standard(s)” talk, the Perl lightning talks, Brian Aker’s “Making MySQL Do More” with embedded perl and customized full-text search and Jeremy’s MySQL benchmarking talk.
Many of the presentation slides are here.
And you can’t fault the evening parties – free mixed drinks by Stonehenge and DynDNS.
Joe S. told me how great yum is (like apt-rpm), and Allison Randal and friends were getting a consulting company called OnyxNeon Inc. off the ground (Open Source consultants, many of whom have written O’Reilly books). Hammered Monty with some MySQL performance questions and got good answers, as you would expect.
Had dinner with the O’Reilly site programmers. They’re looking for somebody to move to Sebastopol and work on their sites, which use MySQL/Perl/Linux/custom CMS app:
http://jobs.oreilly.com/
Also made it to Powell’s Technical Books, a fairly large collection of new and used books. Nice collection of science books on Nikola Tesla.
