Richard Jones' Log: Review of the Open Source Developers Conference (Au)

Well, it's all over for this year. The Python track was a great success, with a bunch of interesting talks presented by able speakers. Lots of out-of-band discussions too. My Roundup talk went really well, with about half the audience not even being Python programmers (and I was up against a couple of interesting-looking PHP and Perl talks, so I feel chuffed :). I got lots of interest after the talk - so much that I didn't get to follow up on a few conversations I would've liked to.

I also did a couple of lightning talks - one on PyPI and another on game programming (the LD48 comp, pygame (sdl perl got a mention) and pyopengl). Actually, I really just wanted to play some video games I wrote on the big screen (about 7 meters across) even for just a brief time :) The PyOpenGL one got appropriate ooohs and aaahs from the audience :)

The conference organisers did an amazing job, and I reckon next year can only build on this year (I already have a number of talks planned). They video taped all presentations, which they plan to have available for download or possibly purchase (on DVD) some time in the new year (there's a huge amount of tape to edit).

Next up for me looks like being PyCon - my boss has given a tentative OK, but would like me to present something. I've just got to clear up whether a Roundup talk would be OK, or whether I'd have to do something more work-based. Then I'll submit a proposal.

The conference will be held next year around the same time, probably in the same place in about the same format. What we need is to be able to expand our advertising reach (without having any money to do so ;) so we can reach more developers - not necessarily just Australian or Open Source ones too. Suggestions welcome.