Confoo 2011
This week I went to ConFoo 2011 in Montral. It was my first time going to ConFoo, a conference I learnt about last year when organizing DjangoSki. I'm keen to support Canadian conferences and it was great to see a big open source conference in Canada. Being a multilingual conference was pretty cool too.
Confoo is really well run for a speaker, with flights, hotels and sorted out well in advance. The organisation continued on site, it was nicely organised and run, a real credit to the organisers. One nice touch was that badges were printed with peoples names on both sides.
In terms of talks, the highlights include:
- Alexandre Bourget gave a great talk on using socketio, redis, gevent and pyramid to build during the talk a demo of a site that: took a user created video, encoded it, showed CPU usage on the server in the browser, shoved the file into MongoFS and then notified the user via a Redis subscription. He finished with an example of showing real time accelerometer stats from his Android phone in a browser.
- Sebastian Bergmann gave an interesting talk about sucky unit tests and how to avoid them.
- Fellow Mozillian Christian Heilmann gave a great talk on HTML5 and the future of things web based in general. He's a great talker and gave a talk that was inspiring and funny, a great ambassador for Mozilla.
- Matt Knox spoke about scaling at Twitter. There was a great deal of information and passion in the talk and a huge whack load of information. I feel like I've got a ton of things to Google if I could remember them all.
But of course, the main thing about a conference, is meeting new people and exchanging ideas and in this, confoo certainly excelled. I spoke about the addons.mozilla.org site. I think it went well and got some good questions, slides are on github.
It's tough that ConFoo is the same time as PyCon (more or less), I'd like to go to both next year. Thanks Montral and ConFoo (and thank you Mozilla for letting me go), hope to be back.