OSCON 2011 Recap

Andrew and I both attended, and spoke at, O’Reilly’s OSCON 2011 last week. All around it was a great experience. There was never a session with less than two talks worth seeing.

On Monday Andrew spoke at the OSCON Data “sub-conference” about exploring ways to play with (analyze and visualize) personal and private data. The talk, which was well put together as usual, was on the first talk of day/week and attracted a great croud. Lots of interest in GeoCommons and its features as well the idea that Andrew laid out for the attendees.

I spoke on Wednesday on Open GeoSpatial Libraries for Ruby. The talk was a good exercise for me to survey the space and dig into a several of the libraries. Having more a python background, it was fun to contrast the various bits and pieces of the libraries. I focused on datatype libs, various bindings, and several Ruby clients to location based services. I had put together some cool examples of running analysis on various data feeds from Twitter, Yelp and Instagram, but I didn’t get the chance to show them off (of course I ran long). I’m planning on putting together a tech blog series on using Ruby to stream social media into GeoCommons. Should be fun.

Some of the highlights of the conference for me:

1. Damian Conway gave an awesome ignite talk the first night.
2. The conference hosted a “Node Day” which was excellent. Lining up the core Node.JS contributors is never a bad idea.
3. Saw a great talk by Darian Shimmy, on “Hot-Potato” the real time processing framework for Ruby . Hot. Lots of idea for some stuff I’m playing with.
4. Seeing Jeremie MIller talk about the Locker Project was inspiring. The project continues to grow.
5. Scott Davis’ talk on local storage and application cache gave a great introduction to the HTML5 capabilities and opened my eyes to the need for more caching all around.

All in all a great conference. Will try to make it back next year and give another talk.