First and foremost — having a tech conference at a summer camp is just plain awesome. As we all know that the social lubrication required to gel a bunch of geeks can lead to a state where said geeks should not operate any kind of a vehicle. In this case, all they had to do was walk 100 feet down a trail and pass out.

Secondly, I really like the idea that the beer follows you at a tech conference… I shouldn’t have to be running all over the place to find my beverage! Thumbs up to the CouchCamp staff for making that dream of mine a reality.

Did I learn anything? Actually, yes I did. I learned some really interested fundamental challenges that database ninjas face on a daily basis. I also saw a possible CouchDB roadmap being developed via the venting of current users, which was pretty neat.

As always Ted Leung came through to finish the grand event off with a great summary of the CouchDB community, where it’s succeeding and where it needs to go. I will never stop appreciating Ted’s open source jedi fu, it reminds me why I am here working in OSS.

It was great to meet everyone, see most of you at JS Conf EU!

A few things come to mind when I think about the conference as a whole. First off, who gave OSCON a Ruby adrenaline shot? The Ruby track was pretty extensive, and I would say more prominent even than the Python track this year. I felt like many of the talks were very introductory with very few actual visual demo’s of things “working”. I know that OSCON brings a very diverse crowd.. but please, please come up with some way to show us if things are advanced, or not. I really get absolutely nothing out of introductory level JavaScript sessions, but a title like “Digging into the guts of JavaScript” could pretty much mean anything under the sun.

Some of the most interesting talks I attended last year had to do with open mapping and location services, I know you want us to also attend the “Where” conference, but these things are part of Open Source and should be represented at OSCON!

I really enjoyed the talk about CouchDB, I hadn’t heard about it and really enjoyed how it opened my mind up to some new concepts about how your application should interact with a database. I would advise everyone to check it out at http://incubator.apache.org/couchdb/.

Another was the “Django Tricks” talk, this was great because he just ran through a bunch of really cool examples — one of which was introspecting a sqlite db to build models from the schema. Pretty cool stuff! Additionally, I think Ted Leung nailed his talk about “Open Source Community Antipatterns”. A lot of the ideas and concepts weren’t new to me, but it always helps to get a more detailed overview from someone who has seen these patterns repeated over the last 10 years.

The best quote I heard was that the “Second OSCON starts at 6pm each night.” I completely agree with this, the social aspect of the conference is invaluable, but be careful about all those free booze — they sneak up on you if you aren’t careful.

I do feel as if I should have done a Windmill talk this year, I didn’t see anything from Selenium or Watir and if we had been a little farther a long with the next iteration on Windmill it would have been a great venue to get some serious exposure. I may attend some other conferences this year, or wait till OSCON next year for Windmill to make it’s big splash.