I attended O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention last week in San Jose, which wasn’t my usual scene. I gave a brief, five-minute talk Tuesday night (which I’ll post shortly) and then spent Wednesday and Thursday wandering between sessions, feeling alternately like I was a) bobbing along the surface of something awesome or b) submerged several hundred feet beneath that same surface, all depending on the complexity of the content. I stuck to sessions on design, usability, business-building, and data visualization. Those were pretty great but OSCON punished me, without exception, anytime I decided to get adventurous, like the session on e-mail protocols that I would have understood just as well had it been delivered in Croatian.

Scattered notes:

• It’s nice to know that, even at 27 years old, there are still things I don’t know, that there are at least a few things I have left to learn.
• Everyone was exceptionally warm and welcoming, even people who, upon subsequent Google background-checking, turned out to be something of rockstars within the community. I wonder if this is particular to the open source ethos or if, more generally, I just go to all the wrong conferences.
• Seriously, Valerie Aurora did everything but sound out the syllables in Li-nux Ker-nel for me. Such is the patience with noobs here.
• There were no handouts whatsoever at this conference. I asked a few people about this and they looked at me like I was high.
• Keynotes were fifteen minutes long. Sessions, forty-five.
• The gender balance here is inverted at education conferences.
• Everyone had an opinion or an anecdote to share about teaching. It was easy to lure someone into conversation by asking her to elaborate on why her ninth-grade science teacher was so good or bad. I had these conversations all throughout the conference, all throughout the convention center. I can’t imagine water management engineers enjoy this sort of ready social icebreaker so chalk one up for teaching.
• Open Source Hero I: Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, who aims to make meaning out of the deluge of data from data.gov.
• Open Source Hero II: Michael Driscoll, who makes awesome visualizations of huge data sets using the statistical analysis software R. Check out his six-dimensional analysis of baseball pitches.