It is really a conference for app developers and script kiddies, although there were a smattering of linux kernel die hards. About 40% of the people there were paid (in some form) to work on open source as part of their job. That was surprisingly high to me.
Some general observations:
- C is still used for everything, in some way. Nothing is likely to replace this language for a long time. However, if it is in fact replaced, it will possibly be due to the changing architectures of CPUs (getting wider rather then just faster).
- I now make the assumption that nothing on the web is secure. There are too many vectors for XSS to make its way into your browsing. People want features more then absolute security. One tip: use a totally separate browser for "sensitive" things, like internet banking etc (and another browser for general browsing - keep your "secure" browser ONLY for those sites, NOTHING else).
- FLOSS has under 2% participation rate of women. This is much less then the 28% for the general IT industry. Yeah, its not a great thing. But, of that 28% - I would wager its taking into account larger parts of organisations that would almost never exist in open source groups, so that may exlpain the skew. No one really knows why. I think men are genetically pre-disposed to have an unhealthy obsession with minutia, which helps in this industry.
- http://www.oncetechnologies.com/radix/ is very interesting. I will keep an eye on it, if it keeps going, and stays open source, may be something we can build on top of.
