Open source in Pennsylvania

This Saturday I attended CPOSC, the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference.

CPOSC is different from most conferences. It's small, with a maximum of 150 attendees. It's run by volunteers. It lacks the pizazz and glitz of the big conferences. It focusses on open source software, avoiding proprietary and commercial solutions.

Despite the unusual approach, it has interesting sessions and good speakers, on par with those at the larger conferences. I attended several sessions and they were just as good as sessions at the Microsoft or O'Reilly conferences.

The sessions I attended included:

- A review of Java, the Tomcat web server, and the Eclipse IDE and how they work together.
- "One-line" programs that do useful things in Perl
- Javasript and how it can be used effectively
- A review of the latest version of Wordpress, which is growing from a blogging framework into a content management system.
- A summary of new features in Rails version 3
- Writing internet applications in Python using the "Twisted" framework. This framework is much easier than the Java RMI or the Microsoft .NET solutions for internet client/server applications.
- A list of collaboration tools for organizing and managing projects with distributed teams

The schedule is too fast to learn any topic in depth. Sessions run for fifty minutes, which is too short to discuss deep technical issues. Effective participants use the sessions as highlights for solutions, noting promising ideas and investigating them later.

CPOSC is targeted to practitioners. The speakers and attendees are practitioners, and can interact and share knowledge. It is a conference run by geeks for geeks. Managers (non-geek managers) may not want to attend, but they should consider sending their teams.

This was the third CPOSC; a fourth is planned for sometime late in 2011. I'm already pencilling it onto my schedule.