The best part of this morning's keynotes was a hilarious talk by Damian Conway. He had everyone laughing till they cried - making fun of Microsoft, Google, Apple and others.
Things starting to wind down, not quite as many sessions to choose from this morning (only 10 instead of 15!) The first one I went to was 10 Tools Developers Need Today by Karl Fogel, formerly with CollabNet, now with Google. (Google's hiring of all the best talent was a noticeable trend.) He described one tool that analyzes Subversion logs to find major contributors. Apart from that he mostly talked about tools that would be nice to have. There were a few interesting ideas.
Next I went to Highly Technical Management of Software Projects by Alex Martelli, also with Google. One of the theories that's commonly voiced is that programmers don't make good managers. This talk argued that programmers can make good leaders of teams. Alex was a good speaker and a lot of what he said resonated with me because the style he described had similiarities with how I work with my programmers. For example, he recommended getting down in the trenches and pitching in when needed.
The final keynote was from Eben Moglen, a lawyer heavily involved in open source issues, especially licensing. He is working with Stallmen on GPL 3. He was a good speaker (although he sounded like a lawyer).
BTW For pictures from OSCON see: http://flickr.com/search/?q=oscon2006
And that's it for OSCON. Saturday I fly home to Saskatoon. Monday I'm back at work and Tuesday I have a new programmer starting. I'm looking forward to getting back to some actual programming instead of just hearing people talk about it!
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