ApacheCon Europe 2005
ApacheCon is always a blast. And Germany is awesome. We've even gotten into a routine. Every evening, Fitz and I and whoever is around go strolling about Stuttgart looking for food, we eat up, then we head over to Lavazza, where we get Lattes and ice cream. The waitress there, I'm pretty sure, doesn't really like us, but we like lattes and ice cream.
I'm working on a WebDAV server in Python (based on Twisted) and having a week of sitting next to Greg and Roy every afternoon and bombarding him with questions has been insanely useful. I was not expecting to get much work done this week, but I was actually very productive.
Fitz and I ran the ApacheCon Lighting Lottery Talks, which was quite fun. The format of the lighting talks is that prospective speakers submit a topic at the beginning of the talk (or beforehand, such as when I run into anyone I know and ask them what topic they are going to speak about…) and we draw names at random during your session. Once you name is drawn, you get 30 seconds to give a talk that can last up to 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, we find ways to remove you from the stage. We needed a timer tool for this, so I wrote one in Cocoa. Roy, being all clever, foudn some JavaScript and had one running in a web browser in far less time, but web browsers are lame application platforms, so I kept hacking on my little app. It turned out rather nicely, with a nice big timer on screen. It perhaps worked too well, because we never got an opportunity to remove a speaker.
We did have some great talks, my favorite being on implementing a Subversion class loader for Java, such that it would find the class in a Subversion repository (using HTTP), compile it, and load it. It devolved into offline support, where it could read you email for the commit logs and piece together the needed Java code from the patches in the logs. I also enjoyed Rich Bowen's talk about why he hates Apache HTTPd.