OSCON: Next week in Portland
I'm starting to get pretty pumped about OSCON next week in Portland. Unlike the rest of the conferences I attend, this one is close to home. My parents live in Salem, Oregon - which is a mere 40 miles south of Portland. I spent my last two years of high school in Salem, so I still have a few friends in the area too. To get the most out of the trip, I'm flying into Portland on Sunday and commuting from Salem to Portland for the first couple days.
On Monday, I'm going to do a Ruby-immersion day and spend it listening to Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson. I hope to come out of these sessions with enough knowledge to write a webapp in Rails. Since I'm aspiring to be an open source web frameworks expert, instead of Just Java - this seems like a good fit. In the next few months, I plan on learning more about Rails, as well as other open source web frameworks in general (any and all suggestions welcome).
Tuesday, I'm giving an AppFuse Tutorial and Wednesday I'll be duking it out with Matthew Porter. Other tutorials and sessions I hope to attend are Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users, Joe Walnes' SiteMesh talk and I could probably stand to learn a bit more about Beehive.
Another reason this conference will be a lot of fun is because many of the SourceBeat Authors are attending. It's always a good time when you rendezvous with a bunch of smart developers. Last, but not least, if you're attending OSCON, you might want to check the New Sessions entry on O'Reilly's blog.