I meant to blog a little bit each day of OSCON, but I didn't get around to it after the first day. I was too busy being away from a computer, which illustrates the main difference between this year's show and the previous couple. I'm lousy at public speaking, so whenever I have to give a talk at a con, I spend the entire time stressing out about it, and usually I have to skip lots of sessions to sit in my hotel room and write the damn thing. Not having a talk this year, I was free to cruise around the talks and be relaxed and social. Made all the difference.
I looked around for talks on scaling web sites and chose to go to the YouTube one. It was interesting enough, but I didn't really learn anything I didn't already know. For instance, they found that eventually they had to partition their database and that they broke some table joins apart and re-implemented them at the application layer. This is the same story I heard from eBay and something that's been in the back of my mind for Cosmo from day one. I think probably the world of web site operators is full of little groups of people who've come to the same conclusions independently by bootstrapping themselves through months or years of booming startups. Apparently there were a couple of other talks at the show that had basically the same content, and I'm glad I only chose to go to one of them, but it's good to have that kind of volume, because maybe the next generation of developers and admins can learn something from them and go back to their job a little more prepared rather than having to figure it all out by trial and error and maybe killing their business in the process.
There were a handful of other talks I enjoyed, such as the open source voting one that I mentioned in the previous OSCON post, and several I meant to attend but didn't get around to, like the PHP 6 and Perl 6 ones. I guess I was too busy hanging out with new friends. The best moment of the show was when the OSAF and Metaweb crews wound up at the hotel bar and I preached semi-drunkenly on the merits of Atompub as a calendar server access protocol. There were many smarter people than me at the table, and none of them pointed out any particularly foolish claims, though perhaps they just didn't want to be rude. In any event, I very much enjoyed the social aspects of the convention, new to me this year, and now I'm waffling about submitting a talk next year and submitting to all that stress again.
