Day one of the OSDC has been stimulating. As with all conferences I attend, the most interesting parts tend to be incidental remarks in presentations or break time conversations.There was a fair bit of Django love today and for me the best bit was a demo of Pinax which I've heard of but not looked into before. It's a collection of pluggable applications to add common functionality to your django app.
The session on Agile development with dynamic languages was very interesting and made me want to go back and re-visit the Design Patterns material in the light of my use of Python.There's an interesting variety of laptops in use, certainly netbooks have garnered wide support, mostly running Ubuntu. Macs, and particularly MacBook Pros seem to be very popular amongst developers, my guess is about a third of those here, and the majority amongst speakers.
One projector doesn't get along with new macs with the mini display port - we tried everything including showing people's slides via a VNC connection! Along the way it emerged that there is a firmware update for the mini display port to VGA adapter. Maybe that's why these little Apple dongles are a bit expensive - they have a computer in them.
We finished the day with "lightening talks" which were fun.
Lightening talks? Please explain.
ReplyDeleteSpeakers can speak for a maximum of 5 minutes each, so those that try to use slides end up wasting half their time sorting the projector out.
ReplyDeleteA wide variety of talks, some info about projects, others pure promotion, if you're bored it's over in minutes, if you want more, you chase down the speaker.
There was a whiteboard up in the foyer where speakers grabbed a spot.
It's a great way to fill the last hour of a conference day.