Finding my way

Its finally here. Right as I am at my work place, exercising my neurons over a programming task, the OReilly Open Source Convention 2005 is going on. Its one conference that I would have killed to be in, if I did not have other vacations already planned at other times of the year. This is not some Java conference or a Microsoft conference where a lot of people are usually in the mindset of thinking in only the language that's the main focus of the conference. This is a place where you rub shoulders with software programmers that revolutionized the industry mainly by creating ingenious solutions to common problems experienced by geeks everywhere - and the best part is, the solutions are free and available to be changed by anyone else for their own benefits! The conference boasts of an illustrious list of speakers that include:

Damian Conway - author of Object-Oriented Perl
Doug Cutting - creator of the open-source search engine framework Lucene
Paul Graham - Lisp evangelist author of many books on Lisp
Erik Hatcher - active contributor for Lucene
David Heinemeier Hansson - creator of the Ruby web-development framework Ruby on Rails
Kathy Sierra - author of the very-entertaining Head First series of technical books
Dave Thomas - co-author of "The Pragmatic Programmer" and Ruby evangelist
Guido van Rossum - creator of Python (my favorite language - beats Ruby by a close margin, in my mind!!)
Larry Wall - creator of Perl

You do not need to take notes - just getting a glimpse into the way the above people think is an experience in itself! I do hope to make it to the conference next year!