Found 9 entries, viewing 1 through 5.
OSCON Keynotes—Nat Torkington and Steve Yegge
O'Reilly has put up more OSCON keynotes. So go over to the presentations page and watch some. I especially recommend Steve Yegge's take on branding(video) and Nat Torkington's Open Source Therapy(video).
OSCON 2007 Wrap-Up
Well, OSCON is over, and I'm back in Menlo Park. I've just spamned the poor Utah Open Source Planet with my inundation of summaries. Looking at the two years I've gone I have to say that it can be hard to get everything possible out of the convention. Some topics sound good, but aren't and vice-versa. In any case, here's some of my impressions.
- You learn a lot about where the dynamic languages are headed. Larry Wall and Guido Van Rossum both have yearly sessions talking about where Perl and Python (respectively) are headed. It's good to be in the known with upcoming technologies.
- Big companies make big open source announcements. Intel's releasing of its Threading Building Blocks is a big deal for the community as we find multi-core systems become ubiquitous.
- Swag: I only got ten shirts this year, I wasn't ...
A Lexicon of Open Source
"r0ml" (Robert Lefkowitz) gave an amusing and interesting look at words, code, and rhetoric. He started by saying that software, code, is the rhetoric of the 21st century and open source is the trivium of code.
If those words are too much, you should stop reading now.
He talked about how we need to stop using acronyms, and rather starting having words. But no words really capture programming terms, so we can steal them from the middle ages (since no one else is using them). He then commenced showing us what great words we should be using for things; I'll highlight a few.
- Bug - depending on type it may be a: amphiboly, aporia, or a catachresis.
- Version Control - stemma
- SaaS (Software as a Service) - Pecia system
- Open Source - chrysography
- Closed Source - decretal (it just sounds worse)
- Reuse - palimpsest
- Architect - rubricator
He closed his talk discussing a pet peeve of ...
The Myths of Innovation
Scott Berkun gave a presentation which drew ideas from his book The Myths of Innovation. He discussed how we all know those classic moments of innovation: when the apple fell on newton, when Archimedes shouted "Eureka", etc. The funny thing is most of these moments aren't even accurate. In reality innovation doesn't just happen in one quick flash. We often picture innovation as an outside force, an the innovator "just happened" to be in the right place.
Real innovation takes a lot of effort. Real innovation is like exploration: risky and with a high chance of failure. Even when true innovation has occurred, it can be dismissed by society or others. Scott went into a lot of detail on these points, and I'll definitely be picking up a copy of his book for myself. It's good to look at how innovation actually occurs and how it ...
Managing Technical Debt
Andy Lester gave a very fun and enjoyable presentation on Managing Technical Debt. Technical debt is all of the TODO statements in your code-Things you know are broken, but never get around to fixing. Andy gave 5 points to getting out of debt and staying out.
- Identify debt
- Determine costs of each item
- Fix the most profitable.
- Stop getting new debt.
- Remain vigilant.
There was a lot of detail in the presentation about how to succeed at each stage. Perhaps the hardest is steps 4 and 5, since both of those often require the understanding of management. Management needs to know why it needs to spend money in better, not faster, solutions.
I really liked how he said for step three you need to work at each item one at a time, rather than tackle it all at once.
