It’s been a busy day, and it’s not even over! I’m scribbling this down during a break beofre the final sessions of the day kick into gear. There’s been a huge variety of sessions (as always) at OSCON – and while I’d love to say “today was about …” and then name something, I can’t even begin to do so. I think trying to characterize an event this diverse is about like the blind philosopher’s describing the elephant. Heh – but that’s not really going to stop me trying.
Two recurring themes are hitting various sessions all over the place, just reinforcement of technology trends and interest that are far more global. The first is concurrency and message passing – systems and styles of programming to take advantage of scale (an interestingly, not necessarily performance at low capacities – although it outperforms at scale) with a very clear eye towards a multi-core future. The folks working on systems today are looking forward and seeing 32 and 64 cores in their servers as a plain given. The synopsis that I heard that in an excellent talk about using XMPP as a message passing system was “Polling sucks”. Pretty much sums it up. There is quite the resurgence of interest in XMPP, by the way.
The second theme is mobile. Intel is pimping a large project called Moblin that they’d even hopped to have a developer day set up for. They cancelled the developer day – and according to this morning’s keynote it’s because they don’t have the community infrastructure they want to use fully in place. I’m waiting for the afternoon talk on Moblin, so I’m hoping to pick up a bit more about the specifics.
There were also a good half-dozen sessions that I wanted to see earlier today, but missed – so I’m hoping that I’ll catch some of the slides at least on the conference site, better maybe even the recordings of the presentations themselves.
Rhonabwy 