OSCON 2010

OSCON 2010 has come and gone. Overall it was a good week. I attended a mix of Google App Engine, Rails, Javascript, and Open Source in Government types of talks. I learned a few things I can take back and use immediately, as well as a few things that may help indirectly.

First, Rails 3 looks like a nice improvement. The ajax/html5 integration will be much cleaner. Deferred sql calls and other framework improvements are a welcome addition. I think we can upgrade without too much effort. I think a single short sprint would do it.

The HTML 5 stuff was interesting, especially vis-a-vis Flash. I don't live in that world, so the contentiousness was relatively new to me. I think HTML 5 is a good thing, but it's not as good as Apple would have you believe. I think Flash is here to stay.

The government talks were interesting. Probably my favorite was a talk about a guy who helps setup thin clients on Linux servers in K-12 and his experiences. Not something we can use directly, but an idea we can pass along to the teachers.

Arduino was something I knew almost nothing about. Again, not something we can use directly, but something to pass along to the teachers so they can use it for collecting climate data. Having students put together sensors, and writing little programs for collecting data, would be an awesome classroom exercise I think.

I also got to meet Ovid for the first time, which was nice. When I sat down next to him he was, unsurprisingly, talking politics. ;)

My favorite speaker of the week was Paul Fenwick who gave not one, but two, excellent ballroom presentations. I get the feeling Paul has a theatre background. Ruby had _why the lucky stiff, Perl has Paul Fenwick. :)

Anyway, good times.