Fri, 08 Dec 2006

OSDC 2006 : Day 3

Wow, I don't know how people can complain about Melbourne's weather. This is the third day in a row of mild, pleasant weather and no sign whatsoever of rain. I do however hear that Melbourne is currently in the middle of a drought.

The first talk attended today was Anthony Baxter's "Building Audio Applications with Gstreamer" which was quite an eye opener. Gstreamer has definitely come quite a way since I last looked at it.

Adam Kennedy gave another flashy and somewhat gimmicky talk "The Portable Image Testing Architecture: Rediculously [sic] Large Scale Testing" about the difficulty of testing the huge number of CPAN modules across a number of operating systems, Perl versions and configurations. Adam is a very engaging speaker, but I sometimes think he goes a little too far (even ignoring the naked flesh).

Next up I gave my "Career Development for Developer Geeks" talk which was basically a rehash of the talk I gave at SLUG late last year. The real irony of me presentling this particular talk was that I had just come off a four week coding crunch of 60 hour weeks. As I explained to the attendees, the past four weeks was a result of me not following the advice I was giving. Anyway, the talk went well and was well received. A version of the conference paper is available here. There's also a career-dev mailing list for anyone who might want to discuss issues raised in the paper or the talk.

After lunch I attended Andrew Bennett's "Coding in a Distributed Team". Andrew's presentation techniques have definitely improved since I last saw him present at LCA a couple of years ago. He also seems far more confident. Good one Andrew!

Following Andrew we had the lightning talks, afternoon tea and the conference close. Thats it, conference over.

Posted at: 16:17 | Category: OSDC06 | Permalink