[video review] Building Open Source Programming Skills at OSCON 2012

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The two talks I find the most valuable for me are the API talk and the code review talk.  Out of which I think the API talk would serve as a nice base when discussing API to network vendors. 

Review: 

The value of the talks vary wildly for me. Some are interesting and some I can't help but to tune out. I think for a large part it is because I am not a developer, i.e. I don't code for food. I spend about at the most 10 hours a week to write scripts and consume other people's code. But I would classify myself as the curious type, and I have watched various online tutorials and books so that most terms in the talks were not foreign to me. However I still find a few of the talks difficult to consume unless you are really interested in the topic. My language of choice is Python, so naturally the topics that were based on Python I can get more out of. General topics such as code review, API certainly offered values as well. Maybe I am not the target audience so please take my feedback with my background in mind. 

Below are my one/two-liner for each of the talks. 

- 1. Learning Online: A bit scattered presentation, some interesting stats on how programmers learn. But there is not really a ah-ha moment for me where a lot of insights were shared. 

- 2. Light Table: "ability to traverse abstraction" by 'poking at different stuff'. 

- 3. C++11: Some new look into C++11, in depth and focused on the topic. 

- 4. Dart: Dart to JavaScript introduction, a combination of history and scanning the language. When C and JS have a baby. 

- 5. Hypermedia API: wish there were more examples in the demonstration. 

- 6. Code Review: I don't think anybody disagree with the need for code review, but always nice to have it in a structured presentation. 

- 7. Erlang: A bit hard to understand. The speaker's passion and method of exploring Erlang is actually more interesting than the language itself. 

- 8. Generic Programming: A bit too high level for me. Programming language starting with algorithm instead of objects and types. 

- 9. Functional Programming: Makes me realize how hard it is to go back to functional language after OOB/Interpretive. 

- 10. Anit-Patterns: Entertaining talk that provokes some thoughts about software development best practices in a funny way. The bad anti-pattern with the voice of reason. Most of the time we know the best practice, but reality gets in the way of following.

- 11 Mocking and Testing: This is a very enjoyable talk about testing change in Google hosting engine. I like the compare and contrast between the old and new and some insights into the philosophy. 

- 12. Go: Gofix is an impressive concept and tool. Quickly try out changes without breaking existing base, rollback if does not work out. 

- 13. API: "Valuable services hides API sins" is a great quote. Valuable, Planned, Flexible, Managed, and Supported.