ApacheCon US 2k5: Heading Home
Sitting in the San Diego airport waiting for a delayed flight =( I even got here early to be safe, spend almost no time in security, and now... wait. That said, is a nice chance to unwind. I have been running on nerves most of the conference for various reasons. Really, I won't get to unwind until (hopefully) Saturday, but this is a wee bit of a teensy breather.
Was a great conference, ApacheCon is still my favorite, bar none =) I wound up doing lots of DB PMC business, which was actually good as it was face to face instead of email to email. Got lots of hacking done as well, but most of it was day job stuff -- a few non-day-job things deserve note though.
Paul Querna gave me a great tutorial on writing apache modules. It
has been... a long time (a decade maybe?) since I have hacked any C,
and really it was much more C++ than C even then. So, in between
writing this and taking breaks from writing I am continueing to hack
at mod_wombat, which is the most r0xx0ring apache
module yet found, it, er, well, it prints out the wombat's name and
age! Woots!
Actually, I really like the module system's design, it makes lots of
sense and is straightforward (as straightforward as C gets for a
professed ruby hacker) to work in. I also like pulling 1100+
requests per second on my powerbook. Expect more
mod_wombat hackery to come!
Trustin Lee's tutorial on MINA (somewhere in the apache directory project, no
internet to get the correct link) which is a wonderful looking
framework for implementing network protocols. Really slick -- you
basically provide a codec and it does the select magic
(or however NIO does it on your platform) to slam app level
frames/packets/whatevers at you. Really looks like a snap. Alex says
it has no external deps, in which case... WOOT!
Julian Cash (google him) was at the conference making photos. He is brilliant. Go find his site (supersnail.[something]) and look over his work.
Lots of exciting Derby announcements. Ted Leung (google again, he'll be on top) blogged one of the most exciting derby things -- Francois [argh, cannot remember his family name] has written an Ajax client for Derby. Yep. Woot!
Caught up with bunches of people I love catching up with and met a passel of people I hadn't yet had the opportunity too. Apache and ApacheCon rock.