OSCON Retrospective

Update 11/14/2008. Andy just sent me a link to this summary of our talk. Not too negative. Cool! It has been a week since Andy and I gave our presentation at OSCON so I thought it high time I got around to thinking about how things went. Happily the "Pimp My Build" presentation went very well. From the get go there were plenty of audience questions, and people with good experiences to share. The audience was mostly long time CruiseControl users and a handful of newbies. With that in mind we glossed over our introductory material and focused on some of the more advanced material. One area of interest was staged builds. There are several reasons why you might need a staged build, the most common being a functional test suite that takes a long time to run. In that case you have a quick build or set of smoke tests to give you early feedback, followed by a second stage that runs the full battery of tests. There was lots of discussion in this section and I hope that means people were getting some new ideas The other hot topic was visualization and sharing metrics with the team through cruise. Unfortunately we didn't have good demonstrations prepared for this so it was mostly just us describing the concept, but it seemed to give some people ideas.

This brings up some of the things we could have done better. We prepared for an audience that included more newbies, but they didn't show up. Had we known, we could have spent more time preparing content on things like metrics and visualization. Also there was my cc.rb sms notifier plugin debacle. I wrote a plugin for cc.rb that sends build status changes out to your phone via sms, however the sms were taking several hours to reach people. It was kind of embarrassing that my live demo (which was supposed to send messages to several audience members) didn't work. Although it was kind of funny to think that several hours after the presentation people were getting build status notifications.

Overall it was a great experience and it gave me a real appreciation for the amazing keynotes I watched on Friday morning. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame gave an interesting talk on WikiaSearch which is supposed to be an open source Google killer. Another talk by James Larsson called Pimp My Garbage (I ripped off the name first, I swear!) was amazing. Here is a video that unfortunately doesn't show the videos James used to illustrate his hacks, so it is missing the best part: where you get to see him shooting at an old plotter with a BB gun, a steady hand game with 75,000 volts, and a hacked version of pong called "Leather Fetish Pong" that uses kinky women's boots as controllers.

Aside: Of the two conferences I have attended this year I really appreciated OSCON's breadth over the focus of RailsConf.