Conferences

I'm plotting, once again, to attend some technical conferences this year.

First up is OSCON, the O'Reilly-run conference on open source software. It runs in late July, in Portland OR. Registration opens in April, but I will probably book hotel and air travel soon.

Also in Portland is Open Source Bridge, the volunteer-run conference on open source technologies. While there is a lot of overlap between the two conferences, there is also a fair amount of different content. I attended last year, even with short notice. This year, the conference starts immediately after Memorial Day, which makes it adjacent to the Balticon science fiction convention. I'm attending that one, and if I want to attend OSB I will be travelling on Memorial Day Monday.

Sadly, there seems to be no E-Tech (emerging technologies) conference this year. This was also run by O'Reilly, with a focus not on software but on tech in general.

A flyer for The Enterprise Software Development Conference (yeah, that's a mouthful!) arrived this week. It seems to cover a lot of the same ground as the now-defunct Software Development conferences of years past. It has a number of the same speakers and covers a variety of topics including C++, Java, security, requirements, web tech, and user interface design. I won't be attending this conference, since the notice arrived too late (for me and my planning). Those who register early get a discount... and the flyer arrived after the last possible discount. (Note to event planners: Sending out brochures that advertise the savings for early registration when it is too late to take advantage of the discount results in annoyed potential attendees.)

The Central PA Open Source Conference runs in October. The 2009 conference was a one-day event with some interesting sessions. It was in Harrisburg, almost within train-travel distance. (I drove, and it was a chore with rain and gray skies.)

Astute readers have observed that make no mention of the big cons: Microsoft's TechEd, Sun's Java One (will that become Oracle's Java One?), and such. I prefer the smaller conferences, and I also prefer open source. I've attended the vendor-run conferences, and I find the material a little too scripted and the people a little too devoted. The open source world has devoted people too, but they tend to be devoted to specific projects and accepting of other ideas. I'm much more comfortable at open source cons.