I attended the O’Reilly Open Source Conference, once again in Portland, Oregon.
Overall my impression was that the talks and vibe were oriented towards Web 2.0 primarily.
I would say that the talks were not as strong as previous years, but it’s easy to compensate for that with the “hallway track” and access to the original Open Source authors.
Several attendees used the EEE sub-notebook computer, and were happy with it as a email/browser tool.
Wednesday
PHP Taint Tool: It Ain’t a Parser
- CS’y effort at PHP parser for code analysis, reminds me of early days of Perl’s B tools
- not suitable for end-users
Write Beautiful Code (in PHP), Laura Thomson, Mozilla
- good general background on good programming practises
- not a lot of specifics about PHP, but available for questions
Hypertable, Doug Judd, Zevents
- HyperTable is a clone of Google’s BigTable, from public paper
- room was packed, some turned away
- still alpha, maybe beta in August
- preferred distributed filesystem is HDFS, works with others
- I recommend reading web site and then looking at the curt slides
- plans to do benchmarks with same hardware as Google has published.
Open Source Virtualization for People Who Feel Guilty About Using VMware So Much, andy michelle, EDA
- cute talk about VirtualBox, Xen and VMware
- Xen has weird nomenclature compared to other tools
- VMware wins on tools and polish
- showed screenshots of unreleased and alpha mgmt. tools.
Barely Legal XXX Perl, Jos Boumans, RIPE
- stunning and twisted example of overloading, short-circuiting, import-faking, whatever it takes to make a loaded module do something other than intended
- illustrates great flexibility of perl, for good or ill
- could be useful for things like testing harnesses, etc.
- motivated to win bet of $100 or 1 vertical meter of beer
- said it took 3 or 4 hours to complete.
I walked around the exhibits area.
Got a demo of Atlassian’s continuous integration (CI) tool, Bamboo. They’re also the vendors of JIRA issue tracker and Confluence wiki, which I’ve used before.
One company had a public Wii game happening.
Thursday
Scaling Databases with DBIx::Router, Perrin Harkins
Ultimate Perl Code Profiling, Tim Bunce (Shopzilla)
- talk and screenshots about NYT perl profiler
The New York Times Perl Profiler
Top 10 Scalability Mistakes, John Coggeshall (Automotive Computer Services)
- good overview of writing high-performance, maintainable Internet systems
- interesting opinion that scalability is not just about increasing performance. scalability can be about scaling up or down, performance or maintainability, etc.
- recommended php.ini settings list
Perl Lightning Talks
- popular with audience, attendees seemed to like all the talks
- Mail::ESMTP looks very interesting for testing and production
Code is Easy, People are Hard: Developing Meebo’s Interview Process, Elaine Wherry (meebo)
- struggled to find time, right approach to interview new candidates in 1996, likely at behest of VCs
- external recruiters hit-and-miss, conferences and jobs email link useless
- phase where non-founder employees doing interviews wanted a founder involved in interview process
- trying to preserve culture (finger rockets, social networking, 2 female founders, etc.)
- came up with process involving reading resumes, phone screens, and office “sim” that adds a new candidate within 3-6 weeks
- “sim” has 3 versions: office manager (plan to erect a meebo office sign), front-end engineer (write a JavaScript app), and back-end engineer (write a server) in 4 hours
- current goal is to keep interview time down to 8 hours per candidate over 10 days
- now up to about 40 employees
- my feeling was that their hiring process started off clueless due to inexperienced mgmt. and is still oriented towards junior engineers. Silicon Valley is full of expert engineers and it doesn’t take 8 hours to interview them.
BOF
mysql-sandbox
Giuseppe Maxia discussed and demoed his very useful mysql-sandbox utility for managing several versions and instances of MySQL on the same machine.
He wrote it for his testing work at MySQL AB. Very well received by attendees. This is a great example of what I call “anti-virtualization” – using ports instead of resource-intensive VMs.
MySQL Conference 2008 Presentation
State of the Onion Address, Larry Wall
- talk about Perl6, random anecdotes, etc.
Friday
Open Voices, Jim Zemlin (The Linux Foundation), Keith Bergelt (Open Invention Network), Karen Sandler (Software Freedom Law Center), Phil Robb (Hewlett Packard)
- panel discussion of various free software efforts, some little-known
An Illustrated History of Failure, Paul Fenwick (Perl Training Australia)
Paul gave an interesting talk on notable Software Failures and estimated a price tag for each. I had heard news reports of many of them, but it was interesting to hear an updated analysis of what really happened behind the scenes.
Thanks to Google for sponsoring the fairly good almost-gourmet lunches. Sure beats the O’Reilly lunchbags from the dot bomb days. (Everybody I know bailed and found a subway shop back then.)
Notes
- Burgerville popular with attendees, can upgrade combos to a shake.
- Red Lion hotel has a small cardio gym with 1 universal machine, no free weights, open til 11 pm
- WiFi password changed weekly, in middle of remodel, lobby just finished.
- There is a 24-Hour Fitness that is actually open 24 hours near downtown Portland. Has basketball court and 2-lane pool. $15 for non-member visitors.
