Six Apart @ OSCON 2006

Looking back over 2006 one of the things that really stands out for me personally is the opportunity I had to attend OSCON. I can think of a lot of conferences that lost their edge once they surpassed some invisible line in popularity and size. OSCON is not one of them.

Precious few of the sessions sucked, and a good handful were seriously helpful and meaningful. Of course my experience at OSCON this year was especially meaningful because I got to share it with so many fellow Six Aparters. In fact, Six Apart sent more employees to speak at OSCON than any other conference it attended in its history; and Six Apart had the largest number of sessions among all the other sponsors. OSCON was a tremendous success for us because we were able to educate so many people about all of the amazing software we contribute to the open source community than ever before.

But in looking back through ProNet's archives, I realize I never uploaded and shared with everyone the presentations that Anil, Brad, Junior, Artur, Ben and Miyagawa all gave. So before the year wraps up, I thought I would take that opportunity now.

• Read Ben Trott's presentation on Data::ObjectDriver - a relational object driver that doesn't suck. Data::ObjectDriver is a Perl module that abstracts developers away from the complexities of SQL, caching and partitioning - without requiring a million other perl modules, and is very extensible.
• Read Miyagawa's presentation on Plagger - a pluggable feed aggregator written in Perl that utilizes a mechanism inspired by the Unix "pipe" to daisy chain a series of Plagger Plugins together.
• While you can't recapture the experience of seeing Anil talk in person, you can at least read his keynote on "Trying to suck less."
• Artur and Brad's presentation on "LiveJournal's Secret Spin-offs" will be posted as soon as it is available (check back here for the link) - memcached, Perlbal, MogileFS and djabberd are all open source applications built by the LiveJournal team that are responsible for powering some of the largest web sites on the Internet.