OSCON 2005 was my first conference since I entered the open source world by joining OSAF in January, so it was really great for me to get a sense of the huge variety of open source development that’s going on in the world. In a way, for me the conference was like getting a compressed three-day college degree in open source. Some of the “classes” had little to do with software per se, but were quite fascinating. Examples that stand out here were the presentation on UCSF’s archive of internal tobacco industry documents made public by the industry’s settlement of lawsuits with several states, and Robert Lang’s keynote on the open-source-like approach that has led to amazing developments in origami in the last fifty years, or).

I did attend the OSAF presentations (Ted ’s Chandler parcel session, and the CalDAV panel and BOF). It was clear that there is a high level of interest both in Chandler and interoperable calendaring. In the case of the latter, there were quite a few questions about scheduling (a separate draft from the base CalDAV spec). In general, this is something both technical and non-technical users really want from calendaring, so ironing this stuff out will be pretty important for both Chandler and CalDAV.

Overall, I tried to attend sessions from a variety of different tracks. I the course of my hopping around, there were a couple of session that stood out for me as interesting sagas of real-world deployment and scaling issues, and how systems become complex in unanticipated ways: Brad Fitzpatrick’s talk on LiveJournal’s Backend, and Randal Schwartz’s on anti-spam measures he’s tried over the years on his domain’s mail server. (The latest, a trick with MX DNS records, seems to be working quite well … for now!) Also, Anthony Baxter’s overview of shtoom (his Twisted-based VOIP implementation) was delivered in inimitable style, and gave good insight into implementing telephony standards in today’s internet.

So far as technology goes, I found Johannes Ernst’s presentation on LID pretty interesting (and Dick Hardt’s earlier keynote on Identity 2.0 was an entertaining and accessible introduction to the general problem of identity on the web). While there are competing initiatives in this space, but eventually this is something Chandler will have to think about. There was enough detail in the Ruby On Rails keynote for me to get a sense of what RoR is all about, even though I know next to nothing about Ruby and don’t work on web apps! One catch-phrase that stood out was “xml sit-ups”: the chore of having to edit and maintain XML configuration files (which RoR helps you avoid). In the case of Chandler, too, the move away from parcel xml will mean less ab work for parcel developers!