I just attended OSCON’s Tuesday Evening Extravaganza and it was quite enjoyable. Unfortunately, the evening started off with the evacuation of the OCC due to a fire alarm (not sure if there was any actual fire as no smoke was seen). At any rate, below are my highlights from the event.
Nat Torkington from O’Reilly is the MC and the first introduction is for the Google/O’Reilly Awards ($5k and a plaque). They are as follows (hopefully I don’t misspell too many names):
- Communicator – Doc Searls
- Evangelist – Jeff Waugh
- Diplomat – Gere Magnusson Jr (Harmony & Geronimo)
- Integrator – Dr. Richard Hipp (SQLite)
- Hacker – David H. Hansson (Rails)
Next up was Larry Wall and his State of the Onion. It was quite funny (hopefully the slides will find there way to the net). Basically revolving around spies, spy movies and the different types of folks contributing to Perl (I know it sounds inconguous, trust me it wasn’t and it was very funny). Then we had David Pennock from the Yahoo/O’Reilly Tech Buzz Game. I’d heard of this before and it is cool to watch, though playing gets a bit tedious (I was unaware that there were prizes — first place was a mac mini, a pass to an O’Reilly conference, a year subscription to O’Reilly Safari and a t-shirt). Next was Paul Graham — this was the talk I was most looking forward to: What Business Can Learn from Open Source. More on this later (hopefully PG will post it to his website or someone will make available a transcript/audio of the talk). Next David Adler gave out the White Camel awards. Sorry, I’m no Perlie so I have no idea what’s going on. Damian Conway, who’s an amazing speaker/presenter, is up next with his research into Dead Languages. His first foray is into Lisp (PG is cringing in the first row), next he delves into programming PostScript (now the NeXTSteppers are cringing), then he attacks C++ and his improvement SPECS (Significantly Prettier and Easier C++ Syntax), finally he proposes that we all program in Latin! TAGS: OSCON OSCON2005 Business Perl Google O’Reilly