Michael's Unofficial Guide to OSDC Day 3

So it's the last day of OSDC (well, 2 days ago :-) and while that's a bit sad, I have to say it's been a fun time. Had breakfast again with Rob, Martin and Erik de Castro Lopo - been good to chat with these guys about a broad range of stuff.

Keynote: Scott Penrose on his web framework called Zaltana looks interesting - the demos were good. If it can truly integrate different web applications under an AJAX-enabled common style, then it would be very nice.

Adam Kennedy on "The Portable Image testing Architecture". The Perl CPAN problem - 23,000,000 LOC, 11,000 modules, 20 perl versions, 100+ known platforms, 150 config params - all modules (unless stated) assumed to work on all combinations!?! Software Combinatorial Explosion - every module needs testing in (20x100x5x4) 40,000 environments. He introduced PITA-XML. He sees a combination of virtualisation and automation as a panacea. Could be applicable to other similar problems.

Erik Castro de Lopo on "Career Development for Developer Geeks". Dang projector failed, which made life difficult for Erik, but he solderied on nonetheless, presenting a good talk which covered a bunch of good ideas and hints to prevent you from losing your life to the day job.

Martin Poole and Rob Collins on "Managing Distributed Version Control". Very many good hints on how to manage a distributed project - the things you should set in stone early to save you from grief later on. Good stuff. I would have liked this to go longer, as there was plenty of stuff that could have been discussed further.

Andrew Bennetts on "Coding in a Distributed Team". One key point is to keep "trunk" building and keeping tests passing using autobots. Passing the test suite is one of two gates for committing to trunk. The second is peer code reviews - done remotely with some useful tool which automagically presents diffs over the web and allows scores to be kept on the usefulness of the patch. Also covered the cool features that a distributed SCM like bzr gives you (like cheap branching allowing 1-1 mapping between branches and bug fixes/branching). Another talk that could have been extended out to an hour to give out more goodness.

Lightening Talks - Richard Jones on Selenium, a web testing recording tool. More people who tried (and failed!) to write code during a talk - this time using a lesser known framework. Someone else succeeded with Ruby of Rails. Some crazy guy modified LISP to take out the parenthesis and used python-indention instead (+1 crazy). Mary Gardiner covered Women in FOSS groups. Paul Fenwick presented an OSDc compiler (which was Jon Oxer's mini-language that he invented and presented the day before) - now available in CPAN as ACME::OSDc :-)

Did the quick dash at afternoon time back to the hotel and then onto the airport to make my flight home, so I unfortunately missed the conference close. But congratulations to the organisers - a good interesting conference! Again I'm blown away by the totally amazing number and quality of OSS developers in Australia!

tech/conf/osdc2006 | 10 Dec 2006 | #