OSDC 2010
This week I attended the Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne. OSDC is a three day event that is aimed at sharing skills and thoughts on software development using open source technologies and is attended by many developers passionate about open source software. This year I believe there were about 150 attendees from all around Australia and around 60 talks in total.
The talks covered everything from best practices in version control, Perl 6, PHP frameworks and CMSs, mobile application development and much more.
It was great to see what others are doing with and getting out of open source software. I was most amazed by Ben Martin’s talk about his project called Libferris. Libferris is a virtual file system which can mount vastly different things that can then be accessed from the shell. The types of things that can be mounted are LDAP, Evolution, images, Flicker, Youtube, PostgreSQL, RDP documents, the DOM in Firefox and MP3 files. This allows the extraction of data available to the shell or custom applications.
Another highlight was the closing keynote by Damian Conroy. This was a talk that lasted an hour and was exhausting to listen to as it was complex and fast, yet extremely compelling. Damian effectively used the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and perl to find prime numbers. The idea and implementation is completely amazing and I suggest everyone watches the video to see for yourself (shown at the bottom of this post.
All in all everyone was very impressed with the event and took a lot away from it. Sharing a beer at the end of each day was a great way to meet other like minded people and discuss what we learnt throughout the day. I am already looking forward to next years event which will be held in Canberra.