I went back to OSCON last month (July 2012), which was held in Portland again. I saw the biggest crowd this year and over 3000 folks attended the conference. Here are some of the tutorials and sessions I attended:
R
I attended R tutorial on the first day, which I found quite informative. There has been a lot of interest in Data Science and R is a great tool for statistical analysis and graphs.
Scala
On the second half of Monday, I attended Scala Koans, which was disappointing. First, they could not get us started with the session as Wifi died on us and they didn’t have much backup plan. We finally started the session after waiting for an hour and then were mostly left on our own to finish the Koans. Yeah, I could have done that myself by downloading Koans.
Android-Fu
On Tuesday, I attended Android-Fu, which was somewhat useful. I have had quite a bit Android development at work, but I got a few pointers.
Android Testing
The second half of Tuesday, I attended Android Testing, which was useful but the presenter was incredible boring and had hard time keeping awake. [Slides]
Go
The real conference started on Wednesday and I attended Go session, which was mostly about governance behind Go language.
Storm
I then attended session on Storm, which was informative described differences between Hadoop and Storm and showed some actual code.
MongoDB
I then attended session on Running MongoDB for High Availability, which showed some of weak areas and lessons learned while scaling MongoDB. [Slides]
Apache Zookeeper
This session was also very informative and it showed various uses of Zookeeper.
Disruptor
I then attended session on Disruptor, which is incredibly fast concurrency framework. [Slides]
Building Functional Hybrid Apps For The iPhone And Android
I then attended Building Functional Hybrid Apps For The iPhone And Android, which was mostly marketing talk for Websphere IDE and speakers ignored value of PhoneGap (Apache Cordova), which was behind their demo.
Node.js
On thursday, I attended session on Node.js, which was nice introduction with some code samples. [Slides]
I attended another session on Node.js about Node.js in Production: Postmortem Debugging and Performance Analysis, which showed a number of ways to debug your Node.js applications. [Slides]
Advanced MySQL Replication Architectures
This was also very informative session and you can take a look at slides.
The Art of Organizational Manipulation
This was entertaining talk about how to build influence in workplace.
High Performance Network Programming on the JVM
This was another informative talk about building network applications in Java and you would slides very helpful.
Summary
I found very few sessions on mobile this year and there were a couple of sessions on Android and I wanted to see more. There were a lot of vendor sponsored sessions on private clouds and a lot of vendors in exhibition hall were promoting frameworks such as OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and others. There were also quite a few sessions on distributed frameworks such as Hadoop, HBase, MongoDB, Zookeeper, Storm, Disruptor, etc, which I enjoyed. I didn’t see a lot of sessions on functional languages as past and wanted to see some sessions on Clojure (which was cancelled).
NoSQL Databases – A few sessions were on HBase, MongoDB and Cassandra. There was a lot of enthusiasm for HTML5 again and a lot of sessions were sold out. Having attended similar sessions in past, I skipped most of them. Overall, I had good time but not sure if I would be back next year. You can read presentation slides from http://www.oscon.com/oscon2012/public/schedule/proceedings.