I’m attending O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference for the third year in a row this week, and I’m getting really excited. I normally write my preview and planning post earlier, but I’ve been slammed getting my 3 hour tutorial presentation ready.

Anyway, here’s what I’m most excited about this week:

Monday

Well, first off, I talk at 8:30 in the morning. Seriously, thanks to whoever’s responsible for that. I get to talk and be done with it and can relax for the rest of the week. Last year, I talked on Thursday afternoon, and it had me on edge the whole conference.

I was really torn on how to spend my afternoon. There’s a tutorial on Django that was tempting me, but I think I’ll be going to Memcached and MySQL: Everything You Need To Know. It’s directly applicable to my job, and a sysadmin from Six Apart and a head guy at MySQL probably know a heck of a lot of stuff. Might be dry; definitely will be full of info.

Tuesday

I’m jazzed about Tuesday morning. John Resig of jQuery fame is giving a tutorial on Secrets of JavaScript Libraries. This promises to be awesome.

Tuesday afternoon was a head-scratcher. Nothing particularly grabbed me, so I’m going to head to Practical Erlang Programming. I hit up Simon Peyton-Jones’ “A Taste of Haskell” last year, and it was the best part of the conference for me, so maybe this will surprise.

Wednesday

Sessions start on Wednesday, so I’ll be seeing a lot more stuff. On the Ruby front, I’ve got An Introduction to Ruby Web Frameworks, What Has Ruby Done for You Lately? (this one looks great), Web Frameworks of the Future: Flex, GWT, Grails, and Rails, and Building a Bayesian RSS Aggregator in Ruby. I’m pretty stoked about all those.

For my wild-card sessions, I chose Creating & Supporting Free Software in Africa: the African Virtual Open Initiatives & Resources (AVOIR) experience and Running a Successful User Group. Open source in Africa is a particular interest of mine, and I’m keen on starting a new developers’ user group in Durham, so I have high hopes for these.

And then, the best part of OSCON: FOSCON. The Portland Ruby Brigade puts this on each year. There’s free food and great presentations. This year, there’s a live coding competition between Rails, Seaside, Django, and some PHP frameworks. There’s also Ed Borasky, who gave one of the densest presentations at last year’s RubyConf.

Thursday

Thursday’s got a lighter amount of Ruby presentations. I’ll be hitting up Sam Ruby talking about Ruby 1.9 and Brian Ford talking about Ruby performance. Excited about the first; cautiously ambivalent about the second. I have a feeling it’ll be about Rubinius, and while Rubinius is cool, it’s not my thing. Maybe it’ll be my thing afterwards.

The rest of my day will be filled with Skimmable Code: Fast to Read, Safe to Change, Wonderful World of MySQL Storage Engines, Code is Easy, People are Hard: Developing Meebo’s Interview Process, and the one I’m looking most forward to, Just Enough C for Open Source Projects. I know C, where “know” is defined as “can kind of read it and can manage to code trivial programs in it.” I hope I’ll come out with some tips on how to polish up my C skills.

Because I used to be a Perl nut, and also find Larry Wall entertaining, I’ll definitely be at the State of the Onion.

Friday

Friday’s a short day, and to be honest, there wasn’t much stuff that grabbed me. I am excited to hear Roy Fielding talk about REST, and I’ll hit up the Free Geek Tour that afternoon. My flight doesn’t leave until late, so hopefully I can send some of the afternoon just walking around.

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