Category: Conferences and Travel

Well, OSCON is over for another year. It’s been a great conference. Shame there were essentially no security talks (1/216 talks is not good enough). I will have to talk to them next year about including a Security track or let OWASP organize a Security Camp, like Scala and the cloud folks had this year.

I went to a great number of interesting sessions. Most were not that well attended, which probably means that I’m a freak who loves odd ball stuff. That’s a shame, because I got a heap out of the conference overall.

Some highlights:

Cloud talks were everywhere. This is the new Ajax. I went to enough cloud talks to be all clouded out. A common theme is who owns the data and how open are cloud systems, really? Open core versus open source was a huge meme.

Breaking it open: How one consulting firm took it open. This was easily the most thought provoking session I attended in all of OSCON. It’s a shame only about 20 others caught it too. Rob and Alexandra were totally engaging and gave heaps of insights to what worked, and more importantly some of the hiccups that hit them unexpectedly, like the Excel spreadsheet from hell.

Moving to the cloud with NYTimes. This was one of those cloudy talks I told you about. I didn’t learn a lot that I didn’t already know, but it was interesting to learn how it went down at NYT.

Deploying an open source cloud on a shoestring. This topic was close to my heart as we’re doing it, but I sank a little when I learnt of the exact scale of the AT&T Labs deployment. In the end, I think different folks have different meanings for “shoe string”. Good talk, as I learnt a fair amount about realistic cloud architecture.

Eucalyptus: the open source infrastructure for cloud systems. Another cloud talk.

Data center automation with Puppet. I went to the latter part of the Puppet tutorial, so I didn’t learn much new at this session, but that’s okay. Puppet will probably end up as part of our infrastructure (need to talk to the guys).

Driving Apache Traffic Server. This talk rocked. Lots of cool information about how Yahoo does their CDN, and the resurrection of a really old (and closed) code base into what is ATS today. I’m going to try it out, but it may not suit our needs as it doesn’t do true SSL load balancing (today).

The hall way track was also pretty dang fine. I met and introduced myself to many folks I’d only seen on Twitter or the blogosphere. I took in the latter half of the phpBB BoF and met the guys, which was cool as I could finally put names to faces. I ran the OWASP BoF session on Thursday night, which had a few folks turn up, including the Portland Chapter Leader.

Internet sucked big time most days. I think the next time I come, I’ll bring a smaller laptop or an iPad or something with a long battery life as finding space near power all the time sucked. This is partially because my Mac’s battery or logic board is failing, but it is also partially a home truth – there’s only so much coding I did during the days as I found most of the talks so engaging and relevant to my interests.

It’s interesting to see the latest fads. For those who had > 13″ laptops, Macs were about 20 to 1 the favorite choice. Netbooks were very common (probably about 15-20% of the crowd), but I saw more iPads than netbooks, which surprised me as it’s so read only, and this conference is not a read only crowd.

All in all, a satisfying and interesting conference let down by the complete lack of security talks.

Woke up at 5.55 am. Mr Body is seriously confused. I finished breakfast by 7 am. This is not right.

Scalable Internet Architecture – Theo Schlossnagle

I’m very sorry Theo, but I couldn’t take much more hand waving and so I left at half time. I think this is more about where I am in my career – most folks seemed interested and what not, but this session was the wrong one for me. So I bailed.

Using Puppet – A beginner’s tutorial – James Turnbull and Jeff McCune

James and Greg were on song and I really should gone with my initial gut feeling and gone for this talk from the get go. Excellent hands on tute filling in the gaps in my Puppet knowledge. I’ll be taking the lessons learnt from the half tute I managed to attend back. We might even implement Puppet! 🙂 Seems fairly straightforward.

Request Tracker Bootcamp – Jesse Vincent

This is the primary reason I plumped for OSCON 2010. There are a few talks over the next few days, but we use RT … badly … within our organization, and that needs fixing. I learnt nearly everything I needed to use it properly, including:

• The RTFM module – mark out a solution as the appropriate answer. This is exactly what we need
• The RTIR incident response module – a solution for CERT style incident handling. This is not quite what we do, but I will look at it anyway.
• The PGP plugin. Definitely going to try and get this going.
• How to fix a few niggling issues. I entered some new tickets for me to handle when I get back. 🙂
• How to configure custom fields … good to know for future enhancements to our use of RT

I’m glad I attended – this was a great session and definitely recommended to anyone using RT. Jesse is a good tutor, and as the original author, he definitely knows his stuff.

In other news

I headed into Portland city for the first time to go get my Mac serviced. The light rail is eerie – it’s just like Melbourne trams, but more segregated from traffic. Getting taxis is a fools errand in Portland. Public transport is king here baby.

My Mac’s battery had been dying unexpectedly over the last month or so, especially at the least reasonable times. At other times, the battery would last a good two and a bit hours (like today), but the randomness of it all is distressing, especially when there’s data loss. So I made an appointment with the Apple Genius Bar yesterday, and popped in today.

They ran some diagnostics. My battery was found to be acceptable albeit towards the end of its working life. The power adapter is fine. That means if the issue continues, I will need a new logic board. On an out of warranty Mac. DOH! Could get expensive.

I came back and had dinner with an ex-colleague of mine – Paul Hanchett. They’re doing it hard in the USA. We didn’t really have much of a GFC in Australia, but here… whoa. I see on Twitter (#oscon) I missed OSCON Ignite. The in crowd liked it very much, but … I’d still rather have dinner with an old friend than do more slides today.

Travelling to the USA was as exhausting as ever.

I flew on the new A380 with Qantas. Nice plane. As per usual, there’s a mix of flight attendants – the openly hostile, the “can’t see you, didn’t see you”, and my favorite, the “never around”. We were down the back of the aircraft, which is fun if you like turbulence (I do), but not so fun for the elderly couple next to me. There was a party of teens in the middle section who had no in flight entertainment units. The units are ancient and have been recycled from other aircraft – and take about 10 minutes to reboot. They run Red Hat Linux from 2002 on some VIA Cyrus processor. So it was like a little party. I got like one hour of fitful sleep  in the 16 hour flight.

LAX is better. They ripped out the old customs hall, and replaced it with something like an airport instead of a manifestation of hell on earth. The customs folks even smiled. I’m not sure what about, but it feels more human than previous times.

There was a stuff up with my hotel and teknology fangummy (they’ve heard about it but don’t think it’ll catch on), but luckily, Australian business hours had just begun and I was in about 28 hours after leaving my folks place.

PHP Quality Assistance – Sebastian Bergmann

My first tutorial was Sebastian Bergmann of PHP Unit fame.

This was an awesome tutorial, and I found out a lot about tools that I had only just started to scratch the surface with. I am definitely going to setup a continuous integration server for my projects whilst I’m in Portland.

Sebastian was a good speaker, but I would have liked more demos in the first half. The demo of Hudson was possibly more informative than the slides itself. Definitely recommend seeing more Sebastion Bergmann talks!

Slides

Productive Programmer – Neal Ford

I attended this session with high hopes as most Thought Works folks I’ve met have been very switched on. Neal seems very switched on, but … this talk started out very slow and covered blindly obvious things that I think we’re all familiar with (source code control, comfy chairs, etc). The tutorial was definitely looking like a hated “hand waving” tutorials.

I considered bailing but none of the other talks in this time slot really were yelling my name. I might have tried Chris Shiflett’s tute as he’s a friend, but I wouldn’t learn much there, so I stayed for the second half.

The second half was a Top 10 with a small Top 10 “Corporate Code Smells” inside. Luckily, the second half was a bit more edifying and informative, but more from a “food for thought” point of view rather than any special insights into enterprise architecture or techniques that I’ve never heard before. This could be due to the point where I am in my career, but I was hoping for more.

The main things I learnt were the hard lessons learnt from Neal’s career. I wish there was more war stories with solutions, and far more detail throughout. If I was Neal, I’d look hard at thinking about the OSCON audience. These guys are mostly devs looking to make the jump to architect. Refactor the talk to be about that jump, the patterns, the scalability of ideas, and so on. Then it would be a HUGE improvement over the comfy chair talk we got today.

The thing I really didn’t like was the slamming of WebSphere (“#1 Code Smell. There’s a reason that WSAD is not WHAPPY”). Slammed not once, but twice in the same list. I don’t like WSAD that much either (it’s an overpriced Eclipse + J2EE reference container + IBM’s own special plugins and “enterprise” / cluster juice), but it’s like saying “your tool sucks”. Yes, but it didn’t need to be said twice in the same list, and I think most folks in the room who actually use it are forced to use it, and are unlikely to be able to move away from it. If you need the things WSAD can do, there’s few alternatives today.

Slides TBA

OWASP – Birds of a Feather

I’ve set up a OWASP Birds of a Feather session at 8 pm on Thursday night in D136. Hope to see you there!

I know I’ve ranted about this before, and this post is no different. OSCON still doesn’t have any security talks, which is like an engineering conference that doesn’t have any structural integrity talks.

A sample of non-functional requirements in the OSCON 2010 program:

• Configuration Management – check*
• Deployment – check
• Documentation – check
• Efficiency – check*
• Legal issues – check
• Performance – check*
• Maintainability – check*
• Quality – check*
• Scalability – check*
• Testability – check*

* I’m going to a few of these tutes and talks

And what they don’t cover:

• Compliance – 0 talks
• Privacy – 0 talks
• Safety – 0 talks
• Security – 0 talks, 1 three hour tutorial

And yet, security is the only NFR that can close your business, destroy shareholder value, get you sued, cost you dearly in compliance and remediation costs, limit your organization or project to irrelevance, and destroy privacy for millions of folks in one fell swoop of ineptitude and cluelessness.

One day, the papers committee will get a clue. It’s not 2010, though.

So all my open source chums – see you in Portland! 🙂