I have been attending OSCON last week. It was a great occasion to meet some very nice people. I especially enjoyed discussing deeply with John Lam, on technical topics but also all those small differences between our companies. IronRuby looks by the way impressive, I hope to have the time to give it a try soon. It was also great to meet the pragmatic programmers folks.
Apparently my talk was well received by the audience, even if one of my demos didn't work. It was about receiving events from the Apple remote control in IRB, but I suspect another computer in the room intercepted the events before mine. The objective of the demo, wrapping a C API in Ruby using BridgeSupport, was however demonstrated.
I was a bit disappoined by OSCON. I found it in general too much corporate, and not really a community gathering event like the other free software conferences I am used to attend (like FOSDEM). Maybe this can be explained by the expensive entry cost.
I appreciated so much the Haskell talks that I am now learning the language.
Portland is an extremely nice city, I was expecting something different. Small, cheap cinema, lots of pubs, free and fast downtown transportation, a huge bookstore, a nice park just close to the city, etc... I wish Apple had its headquarters there :-)
Next conference will be RubyConf, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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