[OSDC Israel] feedbacks from the conference

[Shlomi Fish]

On Thursday 02 March 2006 13:11, Gabor Szabo wrote:
> I need feedbacks.
>
> Please don't just go back to your daily work. Take the time to write a
> few senteces about
> the conference. Speakers want to know what did you think about their talks,
> organizers would like to know what do you think about the
> organization, the place,
> the schedule, the food, whatever.
> How would you improve things?

I enjoyed the OSDC::Israel::2006 conference a great deal. It was fun meeting
all the people I know, and some people I didn't know at all, or only
known through Internet means. Here are my general insights:

1. We quickly ran out of refreshments. In most days we ran out of mineral 
water and Bourekas, and it took a lot of time for them to be renewed. The
refreshments themselves, though were tasty.

Another issue was the complete lack of fruit or herbal tea, and there was
only coffee or caffeinated-tea.

2. The food in the college's cafeteria (which I got vouchers for as a 
speaker),
was OK, but I found myself being repulsed from the thought of eating there
somehow.

3. The rooms were large and accessible, and in good condition. I did not bring
a computer so I cannot comment on the wireless connectivity, power supply, 
etc.

4. I attended the Sunday dinner, in which the food was very good. The tables
were very small, and the plates were heavy, though.

5. My driver and I wanted to attend the key signing party in the BOFs of the
second day, but could not find anyone there to address, so we just went home.

6. I didn't stay for most of the auction.

7. I had a nice time talking to Larry Wall. In the first day, I just asked him
two questions about Perl 6 (one of which was a bug in his presentation's 
code),
and then couldn't think of anything more to say. In the third day, I made some 
chit chat with him, and it was nice.

8. Most of the presentations finished after their scheduled finish. Especially
of note are the lightning talks during the second day, that finished lately
due to Audrey Tang's lightning talks.

---------

Now for comments about the individual presentations:

1. Larry Wall's "Present Continuous, Future Perfect" was very entertaining,
and funny. I really liked it.

2. Uri Bruck's "Understanding and Using Perl Data Structures" talk was
very nice. I knew all the material, but it was still fun hearing it.

3. Yuval Kogman's "Revision Control with Darcs" was very nice. Yuval covered
most of the catches and attractions of darcs well. I think I'll stick to
Subversion, though.

4. Audrey Tang's "Learning Haskell" presentation was very entertaining.
I dare say that I don't think it actually taught Haskell. (as its title would
imply). It did give some attractions in it, which would make one want to look
into it.

5. Gilad Ben-Yossef's "FUSE: Writing Linux File Systems in Perl" was
very nice. Gilad is a very good speaker, and the presentation introduced the
concept of userland file systems in Linux, and how one can easily write them
using Perl.

6. Noam Raphael's "Mutable, Immutable, and Why you Don't Really Need them" 
was interesting, but lacked presentation professionalism. I understood what
he wanted to say, and the concept of "frozen"ing was quite interesting.

7. Ran Eilam's "Property Patterns" talk was interesting. Ran brought the
topic of configuring a program using external properties, which seems to be
completely unexplored in the scientific literature.

8. Audrey Tang's "Introduction to Pugs" presentation was entertaining.

9. I think all the Lightning Talks were very nice.

10. Issac Goldstand's Introduction to mod_perl 2.0 was very nice and
informative. It was a nice rehearse of some things I learnt previously
in other presentations about the topic.

11. Uri Bruck's "Translators' Tools Implemented in Perl" was interesting
and enjoyable. Uri covered the issue of software for translators, and then
showed some code to implement it.

12. Premshree Pillai's "A Date with Ruby" was light and interesting. One 
problem was that I had hard time to understand Premshree's accent but the 
slides helped a lot. Another was that he insisted on writing the code by
hand, which caused a lot of time to be lost.

13. Guy Keren's "Automatic Testing with Perl in a Multi-Platform+Multi-Process
Environment" (which I attended only part of it, because my own presentation
was due at the time) was interesting from what I saw, and I liked it a lot. I
hope he gives it again, sometime so I can fully experience it.

14. Ori Peleg's "Thoughts on Testing" was basically a session where he raised
some issues about testing, with a lot of involvement of the audience. He 
raised
many important issues, and it was enjoyable and gave a lot of food for 
thought.

15. Larry Wall's "Translating Perl5 to Perl5" talk was interesting, but Larry
got bogged down towards the second part of the presentation trying to explain
the modifications he did to the Perl interpreter.

16. Amit Bendov's "The Hacker's Guide to Marketing" was interesting, and
enlightening. It taught me a few things about how to market my open-source
projects.

17. Jason Elbaum's "Multilingual Programming Techniques" was interesting and
well-presented. I daresay it didn't teach me too many things, but it was still
enjoyable to attend.

18. Richie Sevrinsky's "Pass, Shoot, GOAL! Managing a football game in Perl"
was interesting and funny.

19. Thomas Maier's "Indexing TCP Streams within a Large Capture Files 
Repository" was a nice lecture, and he demonstrated a very interesting
AJAX application he wrote using CGI::Ajax towards the end.

20. Roi Avinoam's "Model-View Controller Design Pattern for Web 
Applications" was interesting, and clarified some things about the MVC 
pattern.

21. Ran Eilam's "A Year with Perl" was a very nice lecture. I learnt about the
FIT testing framework through it. I felt that Ran has discussed the various
FIT examples too much, though.

----------

That's it. The conference was highly enjoyable, and I ended up getting a few
job leads through it, which is good because I'm currently unemployed.

Kudos to all the organisers who spent a lot of time raising up such a nice 
conference. I'm looking forward for the conference next year.

    -- Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the
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