After a couple years of putting it off, I can finally say I’ve gone to the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). I spent this weekened listening to a handful of really interesting speakers. Here were my highlights:
- Zend's Andi Gutmans talked about PHP 5 and the future of PHP. I haven't done significant PHP work since 4 was released, so I found a lot of the new stuff pretty amazing. I was espeically impressed by a 2-line example of accessing the Google API via SOAP. TWO LINES.
- David Schachter from Sleepycat (the makers of Berkeley DB) talked about how pervasive Berekley DB is in Linux systems. One thing I definitely walked away with was that a lot of people (myself previously included) myopically think relational databases are the only kind of databases around. Obviously, they're not. I wish this was ingrained in me a couple years back.
- Adam Leventhal, a Solaris kernel guy, talked about using DTrace to find hotspots in Linux apps. DTrace is purely a Solaris thing, but by running your Linux app in Solaris' Linux sandbox, you get most of the interesting metrics.
And of course, Dan Kegel and Chris Dibona had interesting things to say.