« Why Can't We Find Work? | Main | OSCON '06, Day 4 »
July 25, 2006
OSCON 2006
I'm currently at O'Reilly's Open Source convention up in Portland this week. Portland was discustingly hot until late last night when it suddenly became nice out. Which is good, because it's hard to focus on learning stuff when you're uncomfortable. Yesterday morning I spent about 3 hours in a class called "Javascript Bootcamp" -- which was great for me, because I knew not-a-thing about the language... The presentation was definitely necessary for me, although the presenter... Amy Hoy, I believe her name was... she knows a good bit about JavaScript, but she's definitely approaching all this from the web developer side... and not as an experienced programmer...
For example, she showed us a typical while loop and a do...while loop, and talked about how there was no difference, but she liked do...while better, though you can do whatever you want. Well, in reality they aren't the same... Also, it was apparent that our presenter was really, really nervous up in front of the group... though she actually did do a pretty good job with her material (do...while mistake aside).
I then spent the afternoon having my brain twisted around in a class called "Higher-Order Perl" -- which basically talked about stuff you could do by using the functional-programming features availabe in Perl. Basically the class was divided into three topics: function caching; iterators and streams; and parsing -- all largely using closures -- functions that create and return functions
Right now I'm in a break in the middle of a not-terribly-interesting course on marketing to people who hate marketing. There's some good material, but... it's not as interesting as I'd hoped, and I don't think it's going to be as useful, either... talking about "The intention economy" and finding people who've already decided what they want... which is great so long as people already know about what you do.
So, that's what's going on in my little corner of OSCON.
Posted by andrew at July 25, 2006 02:02 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)