Kevin's Weblog

Wednesday night we crossed the river for a splurge at the Portland City Grill, which was very nice, but took a long time and it was midnight by the time I got back. So, once again I missed the Stonehenge party. Honestly, I’m not that disappointed; from what I’ve heard, I don’t think it would really be my thing.

I started Thursday at Ask’s talk on Real World Scalability. I was interested to contrast what he had to say with what I talked about. While we differ in a couple implementation choices, overall the ideas are similar. He spent a lot more time in his talk hammering on the idea of thinking horizontally for effective scaling. One thing I did get out of the talk was a reminder about perlbal, which I think I knew about at one time, but it had passed off my radar.

At the lightning talks, the one that caught my interest was kinosearch, which I might check out with the intent of writing a Blosxom search plugin using it. I need to find out more about how it tokenizes and normalizes terms, though. I started down this road myself last year at OSCON because I wanted to get reasonable indexing of Perl code, but I ran out of steam to complete it.

The big event of the afternoon was why the lucky stiff, doing something I can only describe as avant garde / absurdist performance art about Ruby.

Later on, I went to Project Estimation and Tracking that Works, which was basically an extended example of how to track project velocity and burn-down rate. Since we’re doing some Scrum development at work, this was nothing particularly new for me.

After the sessions, I spun by the ADC event for appetizer bits, then headed back to the hotel to get most of my packing done, then went to dinner with a few of the other Yahoos: Michael and his wife, Ryan, and Eleanor. Post-dinner we returned to the hotel too late for the MySQL party but found a few lingerers in the bar. Eleanor and I sat down for a round and blue-haired Chris appeared, and the three of us hatched a plan to go seek out entertainment of some variety. A couple phone calls established that a few people were hanging out at Aura. Did I say a few? I mean, about half the conference, or so it seemed. It was quite a crowd when we got there and found Andrei, Marcus, Laura, and about a dozen others whose names I’m forgetting or didn’t know. Geoff Young, Greg Stein, and a couple others rolled in shortly after, just in time for us to get kicked out by the midnight last call. We headed around the corner, where we crammed into Cassidy’s. More drinks were procured, more people appeared, and we learned that New Zealanders call a Buttery Nipple something much more obscene. Once again, we were kicked out by last call, this time at 2:30. Since the Max stops running at 12-ish, we piled into cabs and our group ended up at the Marriott, where we sweet-talked the night staff into letting us into the hot tub. Sometime around 5, we finally called it a night (some more reluctantly than others) and stumbled to our respective beds to get to sleep before the sun was entirely up.