OSCon Take-aways

I'm just starting my first work week after OSCon, and as I ride the bus in to work, I'm trying to put some order to my thoughts after the conference. There were a grundle of great talks and tutorials, any number of important hallway (or lunch, or whatever) conversations, a bunch of interesting blog posts from other attendees, and (of course) FOSCon. Beyond the things I expected to learn (like more about DSLs in Neal Ford's talk), I took away a number of themes that will play out in my activities over the next several months (and some future blog posts). Here's my list:

Ruby Community

• The Ruby community is both really big and really helpful — even more than I thought.
• The Rails community really is a part of the Ruby community — despite my fears to the contrary.
• Starting & Supporting local/regional Ruby communities is key to the ongoing success of the greater Ruby community.

Conferences

• It's the people/social setting that makes a conference really great.
• A wider range of opportunities at the conference is important (to a point).
• Organizing conferences is hard — thanks to ORA & Ruby Central for their work on OSCon, RubyConf, and RailsConf.

Publishing

• Publishers can be leading or lagging indicators in a community.
• Communities ned to communicate with publishers to drive the creation of the content we want/need.

Personal

• I have to try harder with my own LOTY (Language Of The Year) — I want to hit Javascript, C, Haskell, and Smalltalk over the next several years.
• I know more about Ruby than I thought I did, but less about Ruby than I want to.
• More people read this blog than I though — I need to write more worthwhile stuff and less drivel.