POSSCON

POSSCON was really great.  It was definitely a long day, but well worth it.  We had to be outside the computer science building at 7:00 in the morning.  On my way there I saw a school bus going by, and I thought I had been left for a second; I was relieved to see the two vans still outside the comp sci building still there! 

Once we got there, I was happy to see there was breakfast waiting for us.  After grabbing a muffin, we were whisked into a conference room for the "opening ceremony."  It was informative including a few speakers from places like Apache and Microsoft.  My next speaker was "Mad Dog" who actually mocked some of the statistics given by the guy with Microsoft.  He seems like a die-hard open source fan who wants to "stick it to the man."  His speech was very engaging though, and he did not really have the heir of a mad scientist that I had expected.  The world of computing and open source has changed so much in his career.  It is crazy that he was in this world from the beginning and is still in it.

Walter Bender was really cool!  You could tell that he was not impressed with the current school system.  He sarcastically mentioned things such as collaborating is condemned as cheating; in the real world, nobody works alone.  I was really impressed that he created an entire activity on the plane here.  Also, I was impressed that he came all the way from Norway to come to POSSCON.  Something strange though, in one of the activities he showed us about matching patterns.  He had a Nazi symbol as one of the patterns to be matched.  I think it is also a Buddhist symbol... but that was strange.  After his presentation, a bunch of us rushed to him to ask questions.  We talked about the activities that we worked on, and he had heard of Fortune Hunter, so that was awesome.  We asked him when he found time to work on open source projects, and he said that he was unemployed, and that was all he did.  I am amazed by that commitment, but I am too selfish for that.

The last presentation that I went to was about using open source alternatives to software that you would otherwise pay for.  That was definitely informative.  It was kind of weird though because I feel like the audience was just talking amongst themselves and answering the questions being asked instead of the presenter.  He was talking about web development, and which tools he used.  Afterwards, we asked him which were his favorite tools for web development and he said that he was most comfortable with PHP.  He also praised Ruby on Rails.

Overall, I had a great experience.  I talked to two presenters, and I sat with random people at lunch that I talked to.  They were from Oracle, and I asked them all about opportunities.  They said that they are all over the world, and nearly all of the locations accept interns, and that this would be a great way into the company.  I am interested in user interface development, and they said that they have pretty much every kind of computer science position.  This conference was well worth the 12 hour day!