OSCON 2008

What a week!

First off, here are the slides from my talk “CouchDB at 10,000ft”. Thanks to everyone who showed up and a double thanks for the eight of you who rated my session so far. More special props to the ones with constructive criticism. I’ll do better next time. If you haven’t already, place your vote.

Ted has some nice pictures of my talk and the discussion afterwards. The feedback I got was great and people do really want to use CouchDB. This is great encouragement for putting in some after-work hours to push things towards 1.0.

But OSCON.

This was my first and I couldn’t have liked it better. I got in Sunday without any signs of jetlag (will blog about the secret later) and started things off with dinner & pub crawl with my old (and some new) PHP friends.

OSCON starts at around 8:00, the official programme ends no later than 18:00, but there’s a lot of after-conf activity. It basically means dinner, drinks and party until midnight, or even later with an occasional BoF session thrown in. The next day starts at 8:00 again. 7 days. Is that exhausting? Yes. But it is also great times.

I met a bunch of Apache folks that are connected with the CouchDB project which was nice. The XMPP folks are interested in bonding with CouchDB as well, as are the Python folks I’ve met. Heck, even Brian of MySQL fame is a big fan of ours.

I’ve attended (among others!) a talk on Prophet, a “Prophet is a peer to peer disconnected, replicated property database”. Sounds a lot like CouchDB for sure, but with a different focus. And thus, with a few cool ideas I really like to steal from them. Jesse said he’d be cool with that when I asked him afterwards and I am glad he is.

They focus a lot on integration with other data stores. They have a plugin architecture that allows them to write little modules that translate data schemas across systems. That would allow you, for example, run bug tracker A on the database of bug tracker B. This is pretty neat stuff and worth looking at.

OSCON is big. Everybody is there. And while I am more of a smaller conference kind of guy OSCON is pretty good given its size. I hope I can make it again next year.

Oh hey, and O’Reilly, if you are listening, food on the tutorial days was not, you know, that good.

Finally, thanks to Duncan and Chris who put me up for the week. It was nice seeing you and I hope to see you again soon! I had a great time in Portland.