OSDC 2010 Conference Wrap-up

Last week I attended the 2010 Open Source Developer’s Conference at Melbourne’s Abbotsford Convent.

Below is a summary of the event:

PHP Pre Day

I attended the optional PHP Pre Day on the Tuesday. This was organised by Microsoft’s Nick Hodge.

Topics included:

• Joomla
• Zend Studio 8
• Debugging & Profiling PHP using xdebug
• CakePHP
• mod_php vs FastCGI

In particular Graham Weldon’s xdebug presentation was particularly informative. Although I already use xdebug for debugging and profiling, I still learnt a lot about using Textmate and MacGDBp for debugging.  Until now I have been using Netbeans, but it can be quite slow and clunky so I’d like to switch to something else.

Graham’s other presentation on CakePHP was also useful because I hadn’t looked into CakePHP since 2008 so it was good to see what has changed in recent years. Graham is a CakePHP core committer, so he had in-depth knowledge of CakePHP’s strengths and weaknesses.

PHP pre-day attendees were given a 8GB thumb drive courtesy of Microsoft, so that was a nice bonus!

Main Conference

The 3 day conference programme was jam packed with a wide range of open source topics, projects and languages.

In particular I enjoyed Scott Penrose‘s presentation on Developing mobile applications with Sencha Touch. It looks like a great way to write mobile web applications that are targeted for iPhone/iPad/Android devices, and I plan on giving it a try sometime soon.

The MariaDB, or how MySQL didn’t die with the Sun/Oracle take-overs presentation was also interesting because I hadn’t looked into MariaDB before.

The Venue

I found the Abbotsford Convent to be a fascinating venue for a conference. Its 6.8 hectare grounds consisted of many 100+ year old buildings, plenty of gardens and lawns, as well as small bar that had many interesting beers on tap.

During one of the lunch breaks I spoke to one of the people who use the Convent as an office. There’s an amazing range of creative people that use it as their daytime office – including artists, writers, designers and architects. If you’re creative and looking for a Melbourne-based office, I recommend checking it out!

Conclusion

OSDC 2010 was the first time I had attended an OSDC conference, so I didn’t really know what to expect.

Overall, I found the wide range of topics quite interesting, and I managed to meet quite a few people too.

I would definitely recommend that you attend next year’s OSDC (which is going to be in Canberra).