Have to say that, everything that didn’t involved air travel (I’ll go ALL into that later) was awesome on this trip. Had a good time and learned some useful things at OSCON, enjoyed good company and had a good time exploring San Jose and the Bay Area in general.
OSCON was good this year but not as good as in years’ past. This may be due to the new location, which doesn’t seem as conducive as the Oregon Convention Center did to a conference like this. The OCC was round, and all the meeting rooms were clustered in a central area - there was never more than a short walk between panels. But the San Jose Convention Center is more of a traditional box design, with a single LONG hallway. This means that if you’re in J3 and have to go to B2, good luck, because it’s a 15 minute walk. For a conference like OSCON, this kind of sucks and absolutely kills the “community” feel of it.
Also, like many things, it suffers from diminishing returns. Because a lot of this is stuff I’ve seen before, every year that I come, I have to work harder and harder to find something new. Three years ago, I was doing well to decide what not to learn about. So this may be my last OSCON for a few years, though I’m thinking of attending Velocity (held down the road at the Fairmont) next year.
I did attend some interesting side panels, including one on home automation. I have some ideas that I’m sure will drive Sarah crazy.