OSCON 2014

I attended OSCON 2014, held in Portland, Oregon. I think Portland is a mecca of open source: OSCON is held there every year, the Intel Open Source Technology Center is in nearby Hillsboro, and Linus Torvalds is based in Portland too.

I wanted to attend several sessions this year, but I didn't find many topics related to my work — most of them were at a higher level than the system layer. Still, as a web engine developer, it was great to hear directly from web developers.

OSCON is a bit different from other F/OSS conferences. It focuses on web development, the cloud, databases, programming languages, and hardware like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino, so there were no Linux kernel, GNOME/KDE, or other system-level topics. For my interests, GUADEC or FOSDEM is a better fit.

Even so, I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the conference. I saw many hackers and geeks hacking away around the session rooms, and there were BoFs running until 10 PM.

Many companies with open source solutions joined the expo to show their products and services. Intel, for example, showed a Crosswalk demo video in which a web application running on Crosswalk controlled a drone remotely — Crosswalk talks to the device in JavaScript and communicates over a wireless network. It was cool.

I also had the chance to try Firefox OS. The device looks cheap, but the UI responsiveness is really good. I heard it costs just $150, though it was only released in some developing countries; I hope to see a Firefox OS phone in the major markets. I learned a lot in the Firefox OS session, where the speakers explained how to build Firefox OS applications and use the development tools. It was interesting to learn that Firefox OS applications can also run in Firefox for Android.

I need to broaden my knowledge of other areas to enjoy the talks at OSCON more next year. :-)