The morning keynotes were a bit boring for me so I went out to the hall and started checking email and such. There was a lady who was doing some interviews to gather research for a paper on the open source movement and about technology groups in general and she spoke with me for abour twenty minutes, it was very interesting.

I ran down to the Exhibit Hall to see if there was anyone new but there wasn’t, and no one had brought in any new swag or anything so I went and sat in one of the blow-up chairs until the first session. The first session was done by Rasmus Lerdorf, the creater of PHP. It was very cool to see him speak and to think that he created the programming language that I use every day. Plus, he was a good speaker with a good topic.

The next session was about PostgreSQL, an alternative to MySQL which I figured I’d check out. I’ve been wanting to plat with it for a while but I’m so comfortable with MySQL that I don’t see any reason to switch over. I even asked the guys at the PostgreSQL both why I should switch, and they seemed a bit unprepared for that question.

The afternoon continued with presentations on PHP from Chris Shiflett again, Laura Thomson, and John Coggeshall – all three are major players in the PHP world. All three were very interesting sessions.

I next attended a meeting of the local PHP group, PDXPHP (which I’ve attended before), because they had almost every PHP big-wig at OSCON drop by from some Q&A. Rasmus, Chris, Laura, John, Andre, Wez, etc. It was very exciting.

I got home a bit earlier than expected but I immediately started working on some TechTracker work. There was some urgency in the work so for the first time in three years I was up until 2 the next morning.

The second day of OSCON was definately better in terms of the session content.