1530: Closing ceremony, conference feedback, etc. Lots of chatting. Spirits are high. Lots of commentary. I’m sure the Open Source Bridge staff will be sifting through them (and the online survey forms) for a few weeks.
1422: couchdbkit or couchdb-python?
1304: Pasta and meatballs that were quasi-Italian. Then back to CouchDB.
1205: I’ve successfully built and installed CouchDB. I rule.
1545: Keeping Agile at the Heart of the Internet,Larissa Shapiro. This turns out to be a Scrum overview. Not what I expected.
1430: Data Warehousing 101, Josh Berkus. “Big data” is relative to contemporary typical commercial data sizes. Archiving: WORN data. Usually needed for regulatory compliance, and has very liberal response time requirements. Data mining: You don’t know what’s in there, but you want to find out. Semi-structured, lots of data, data is produced as a side effect of other business processes. Analytics/BI/DSS/OLAP: Use large amounts of data to produce interesting and informative visualizations.
Dimension synonyms: Facets, taxonomy, view, secondary index. ETL: Extract, Transform, Load. This is the entire process of turning external raw data into useful database data. E.g., processing apache logs and storing the result into a web analytics db. Clean up, normalize attributes, de-duplicate data, etc.
1330: Technical Debt, Elizabeth Naramore. Code or practices that will hinder your future progress. Too much cripples the team. This is another talk where you’re very happy to not recognize your code or practices in anything that’s up on the screen. Hmm, Sonar.
1900: Guided Tour of IRC, Peter Fein. This promises to be a treat, listening to he of Telecomix renown. Hmm, should I use Colloquy or Snak on OS X? We venture onto the Telecomix IRC server. Then we venture onto AnonNet. Ooooo!
1545: Testing Antipatterns, Matt Robinson. Not running tests often enough. Not fixing broken tests before committing new code. Tests are too slow. Inaccurate mocking. Etc. This was one of those, “I’m glad I don’t see myself in these slides,” talks.
1430: The Big Data Exploratorium: Data Mining, from Patents to Memes, Devin Chalmers. (I had too many carbs at lunch, hoo boy.) A ton of great ideas here for IP Street, if only we had the resources to look into them.
1630: Rather than hitting the night’s parties and socials, I’m going back to my room to chill. Have to pace myself. 
1545: Massively Scaling Django for a Global Audience with Playdoh, Frederic Wenzel. The speaker works at Mozilla, which has more than 140 live websites. Lots of sites, lots of load, lots of scaling. About 35 web developers divided into seven teams to support this. This doesn’t include QA or IT. “Mozilla loves Django.” Playdoh = Django plus libraries plus docs. Playdoh is a grab-bag of low-level libraries.
Mozilla add-ons web site = 5 MM page views/day. Firefox input = 30 K page views/day. The smallest server setup: 1 load balancer, 2 web servers, 2 MySQL, 2 memcached servers. Performance, optimization, localization, security, and deployment tools. The Playdoh library suite looks very cool, I’ll keep it in mind for IP Street.
1430: A dozen databases in 45 minutes, Eric Redmond. In trying to make this topic more approachable, the speaker gives short shrift to ACID, BASE, the CAP theorem, and a host of other topics. This is a bad survey talk. The speaker seems very smart, so, maybe he’s just ill-prepared for his talk today.
I’m here in one piece. Futzing and chilling before the conference’s start.
Monday, I’m Portland-bound for Open Source Bridge. I’m looking forward to the community, seeing old friends & acquaintances, learning some new tricks, maybe discreetly spreading the word about the work I’m doing at IP Street, and learning about new Portland startups and small companies that are using Python.
The Open Source Bridge schedule has been published. Yeowzer, I can’t wait!
I’m going to make this conference a combination learning && networking && vacation. If I do my job correctly, when I return I’ll be exhausted and need a blood transfusion.
My work is going well. We released a substantial pre-alpha of our product, and the first reactions are positive. I can’t say more than that, except to say that we’re now in a slog to reach the next release, which, if all goes well, will be somewhere between an alpha and a beta. Time will tell.
It’s over. It was great. I learned a lot.
I didn’t give back as much as I wanted to. Well, that’s a little dishonest – I don’t think I gave back at all. I intended to (I had a crackin’ idea for a lightning talk) but I didn’t carry through. My bad. I will do better next time.
I sent Selena some comments about it:
I tremendously enjoyed this year’s conference. I attend only two conferences each year, PyCon and OSB, and I find the energy level and attitude similar and equally enjoyable between them.
I may not attend your wrap-up session today at 3:30. So I’d like to send you this mail with my feedback. I hope you don’t mind.
Please take this only as constructive criticism, to try to help in a small way. In doing this, I FULLY recognize that I might not be your target demographic or psychograhic! How much to factor in any of the following is up to you.
Feedback and suggestions:
1. This year’s location was better than last year’s. It’s good to actually be in downtown PDX. But I’m not saying that last year’s location was awful! If you could save money by going back to OCC or some equivalent place, I would consider doing that.
15:30: Ending keynote and session wrap-up.
14:30: NSFW. Don’t remember what this is, but the name intrigues. Heh, among other things, fun with Chat Roulette.
14:15: It was.
13:30: Advanced Trolling. This should be good.
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://seeknuance.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/getbutton.png){kind=small}
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