OSCON 2006

Just a short recap from last week's OSCON, while I am on the plane back home (I really love on-plane WiFi). After a terrible travel to Portland (including delays, rebooking on other flights, and finally the information that my hotel reservation could not be found, *again*), I faced the usual issue with large and well-organized conferences: too many interesting presentations at the same time. So I missed quite a lot of the PHP content, some of which I had already seen elsewhere, but also new stuff like Adam Trachtenberg's advanced SOAP presentation which I was looking forward to (but I was lured into an OSCamp session titled "Why we suck", by Microsoft, which was quite interesting, but sometimes on the verge of escalation). Among the presentations I did see were one on upcoming changes in Perl 6 (both entertaining and confirming why I quit using Perl altogether eight years ago), Andrew van der Stock about AJAX security (which I find an overrated topic, but he showed nice examples and also did not rant about PHP too much this time ), Luke's & Laura's tutorial featuring a poker application, some of the other OmniTI presentations (too many to mention ), and some other AJAX-related stuff (mostly regarding cross-site applications). As usual, there were some quite bad speakers, but the majority was excellent.
Another scheduling problem was Thursday night which three overlapping events: PDXPHP, a Microsoft sponsored dinner, and Powell´s technical bookstore. I tried to attend both, but after meeting Patrick Reilly at the MS dinner and chatting about PHP, other technologies, and the movie industry, I completely lost track of time. Sorry. When I returned back to the hotel later after over four hours of eating and drinking, I even ran into half of the PHP crew, but declined going for cocktails again. Conferences obviously take their toll on me
My Atlas presentation, by the way, went very well. Only half of the attendees were actually using ASP.NET 2.0 (who wonders at OSCON). Contrary to popular beliefs, "the guy" was not in the audience; I only got intelligent questions, from people sitting in the middle.
Already looking forward to next year!