With a only a couple of tutorials and an evening intro thing, there wasn’t much going on to report. My morning tutorial was Damian Conway’s “7 Principles of Better API Design”, which was fantastic. While a little Perl-centric for me, there was still plenty to take away and apply to an up-coming project of mine (although it was interesting to note that he approaches APIs in a more general sense than I had been thinking: my project is more of an API to a data warehouse). As a side note, Damian is a fantastic presenter, and he makes everything interesting and more enjoyable, and this tutorial was no exception.
The conference proper kicked off in the evening with a couple of events: the “OSCON Ignite” quick-talks (each of the 10 speakers got 5 minutes with 20 slides that advanced “automatically” every 15 seconds), which was great fun, and the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Awards.
In all, the first two days of tutorials where very good this year, with some good speakers, and some good, applicable information. Now we can concentrate on the rest of the week, which is looking fantastic: from the sessions to the exhibit hall to the parties in the evenings, it’s looking like it’s going to be a great conference!